Banking in France and Switzerland

So, you’re being paid in Swiss Francs (CHF), but most of your expenditure is in Euros in France (or elsewhere). Firstly, lucky you, you’re probably going to feel quite well-off! All you’ll have to pay for this is a bit of administrative faff, which I’ll explain below. I guess that this advice also works in reverse, but I can’t imagine many people will be in that situation.

Firstly, your employer will probably want to pay you into a Swiss bank account, although I have read that this isn’t always the case. If they do, you can set one up at any branch easily enough with a French address. We went with UBS because they seemed to have the lowest fees – all current accounts that I’m aware of incur a monthly fee (with UBS it’s just 3CHF for a basic current account – you have the option to take a ‘banking package’ for around 10 or 15 CHF). The only slight snag was they wanted our French tax number – which we clearly didn’t have as we’d only been there a few weeks. In fact, you don’t get a tax number until you have done your first tax return in France, which may be over a year later. I explained this and they suggested that they would ‘let me get away with it’ – I would have thought it was a common query.

They sold me a banking package including a CHF and a Euro account, which I took because it was free for the first year, but I quickly discovered that the Euro debit card they provided me with was terrible value – there was a fee for every single transaction in France. I kept the package for the first year, but never used the card.

I don’t know if it’s possible to do any of this before you have a French address, so it may take you a bit of time before you can get paid – I had to wait a couple of months.

Secondly, you’ll need a French bank account to pay your rent and utility bills. We set one up with our UK address because it was required in order to rent our apartment. Regardless, Britline by Credit Agricole is very convenient, especially if you don’t speak French – their advisors are really friendly and helpful, more so than any UK bank call centre I have encountered. We then later changed the address to our French one. Alternatively, just walk into any French bank, but you’ll need proof of address in the form of your ‘bail’ (rental contract).

One point to note is that you’ll have to pay an extra annual fee to get a bank card with either of these accounts (eg 40 CHF for a debit card or 100CHF for a credit card with UBS, 41 Euros for a debit or credit card with Credit Agricole) – something you’re probably not used to if you’re from the UK. If you want to avoid this expense… read on / skip to option 4 below.

So the challenges is – how do you convert your CHF from your Swiss account into Euros in your French account?

Firstly, a quick word about exchange rates – Ignore this bit if you already know about the interbank rate.

If you google “1 CHF in EUR” you’ll find out how much 1 France is worth in euros. This is called the interbank or visa exchange rate. It’s the best exchange rate you will possibly get, and it’s the same both ways around (eg. if 1 CHF was worth 2 Euros, 1 Euro would be worth 0.5 CHF). However, many foreign exchange companies will quote you a worse rate. As I write this, google tells me the 1 CHF is worth 0.89 Euros, but postfinance.ch only offers me 0.88 Euros.

So, one key point is that you want to be aiming for the interbank rate. Companies will often say “commission free”, but their rate will be 3-10% worse than the interbank rate. It’s clearly better to pay a 1% fee than to take this bad rate. All my figures below are relative to the interbank rate. So, how do you transfer money….

Option 1 – The lazy expensive way

Just transfer using your Swiss internet banking. We never actually did this but it is bound to be expensive. When I transferred money between my CHF and Euro accounts within UBS the fee was 1% off the interbank rate, which is actually pretty good. I suspect that there may be additional fees if you’re transferring to an account abroad.

Option 2 – The easy, cheaper way

Use Transferwise. You can simply use it to transfer money between any two different accounts. The fees are clearly stated and usually around 0.5%. You say how much you want to transfer and into what account, then it provides you with local (wherever you are sending the money from) bank details that you send the money to. This seems a little suspicious at first (I was slightly nervous when transferring £15,000 to buy a car!) but Transferwise seems to be a well-respected company and overall, this is the easiest and cheapest way to transfer a large amount of money. A friend of mine recently used it to transfer a six-figure sum for a house deposit.

Alternatively, you can set up an account with Transferwise, send CHF into your account, then send it on to a Euro account, again with a clear fee of around 0.5%.

Option 3 – The easy, even cheaper way.

Use Revolut. Open a Revolut account using the app: you can easily open accounts in GBP, CHF and Euros.

Get a debit card with your Swiss account (roughly 40CHF / year) and use this to top up your CHF account on Revolut (no fee). Warning – I have never actually tried this myself and Neil suggests in the comments below that it doesn’t work with a UBS debit card.

Transfer CHF to Euro within the Revolut app. This has a 0% (yes, zero) for the first £5000 per month. The Revolut app is also great for tracking the exchange rates, and you can set up an auto-exchange – asking the app to exchange your CHF to Euros only if the exchange rate reaches a certain level. So as well as saving on the fees, you will also end up getting a better rate. Note that Revolut gives a 0.5% worse exchange rate at the weekends (a bit weird) so it’s almost always better to transfer during the week.

You can then transfer Euros from Revolut to your French bank account (no fee).

You can also get a Revolut debit card (£5 one-off fee) that you can use to spend money / take out cash anywhere in the world and always get the interbank exchange rate with no fee – great.

Option 4 – The more complex, really cheap way.

Use Transferwise and Revolut. Set up an account with Transferwise and order a transferwise borderless card. Set up an account with Revolut.

Transfer CHF from your Swiss account to your Transferwise account using your Swiss online banking. This is fee-free as you’re just transferring CHF to CHF.

‘Top up’ Your Revolut account with CHF using your Transferwise borderless card. It will give you a message saying “are you sure you want to top up in CHF?”, because it thinks that the card is a UK card, not realising that you have CHFs in your transferwise account. Just say yes. Again, there is not cost to this process, you’re still just moving your CHFs around.

Transfer CHF to Euro within the Revolut app and follow the rest of the advice from Option 3. If you get a Revolut debit card, you won’t need a bank card with either your Swiss or French bank accounts.

Worth the hassle? By avoiding fees completely and getting the best exchange rate you’ll end up saving around 1-2%. This doesn’t sound like much, but remember that this is 1-2% of nearly all the money you earn. You may have guessed from my love of admin that this is the approach we use!