Swissquote: Swiss broker for non-residents

Swissquote is a Swiss banking institution supervised by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority. Its status as a bank — and not merely a broker — changes the nature of the protection: cash holdings fall under the Swiss deposit guarantee scheme.

This scheme protects deposits up to up to CHF 100,000³ per client and per bank. The ceiling applies to all cash holdings at the institution, regardless of the number of accounts.

Securities held in custody follow a different regime from cash: they remain the client's property and are kept off the bank's balance sheet. The deposit guarantee therefore does not concern them, and its ceiling should not be read as an investment limit.

Custody fees for a private client follow a schedule tiered by assets, billed quarterly. They start at figure being updated per quarter for the smallest holdings and are capped at up to CHF 50¹ per quarter for a portfolio of less than one million.

Brokerage commissions on shares start at from CHF 3² per order. This amount is an entry point, not a single price: it depends on the exchange, the size of the order and the plan subscribed to.

We do not publish the full schedule of commissions exchange by exchange, nor the currency conversion fees applied to an order denominated in a currency other than that of the account: they are not available in a form that we could cite in full and date.

• Is their country of residence accepted for the product in question? The answer depends on the product and on nationality, not just on the country.
• The account currency: an account held in a currency other than that of one's income creates a permanent currency risk.
• The reporting obligations of the country of residence: a foreign account must be declared almost everywhere, and the automatic exchange of information makes it visible in any case.
• The taxation of investment income in the country of residence, which takes precedence over that of the country where the account is held.

None of these points depends on the choice of institution: they arise in exactly the same way with any foreign broker, and over time they weigh more heavily than the difference in commission between two providers.