I opened an account with the KantonalBank in about 20 minutes, all I needed was my passport - no proof of employment, no permit, no proof of Swiss address, nothing.

In my experience with HSBC, be prepared for the following if you keep your UK account over here:

1) Every time you use your card, they take the funds a day after they make the authorisation for the transaction - because of changes in the exchange rate, the two figures never match up, and so this means that as far as your "cleared funds" are concerned, you have spent twice as much as you actually have. They won't do anything about this, you just have to wait for 5 working days for the pending authorisations to "drop off the system"

2) Every time you call to speak to them with a question, they ask whether you let your issuing branch know that you were going on holiday. They have no answer when you tell them you moved here, and that you need things sorted out.

3) They try and resolve every problem as if you were still in the UK - I've lost count of how many times I've been told - "Go into your local branch", or "We'll send a new card to your branch", or similar. I then ask them politely where their nearest branch is to Zug, as I've yet to see any HSBC branch in Switzerland (except the posh one on Paradeplatz which I suspect I won't be allowed to use)

It all got too much when I finally got my bank account sorted over here, and called them to ask for their IBAN number to make a bank transfer every month to cover my direct debits for various UK expenses - the bloke on the phone gave me my unique e-banking login number. I explained to him his mistake, and he told me "No sir...that's what an IBAN number is"

At that point, I decided to have no more dealings with HSBC. Incredible.