Anyone here have their mortgage with Postfinance? We've been to them, UBS and Raiffeisen for offers and so far they have been the most helpful and transparent.
We initially went to UBS as they have been our bank for 15 years now and they were willing to let us pledge our 2nd pillar pension. However, they have had a lot of bad press and are leaking customers left, right and centre. We next went to Raiffeisen, but they weren't willing to let us pledge the entire pension for the downpayment and required cashing in some of it, in addition to more cash upfront. Postfinance also required us to cash in part of our pension, but she very quickly was able to calculate a life assurance/3rd pillar scheme to more than cover the shortfall in our 2nd pillar. Postfinance also have the lowest interests rates of the 3. I know we would pay tax on the cashed in sum, but I calculated that it would still be cheaper than interest payments on a @100k higher mortgage.
Both my wife and I came away from Post with an extremely positive opinion, which was not the case with the other 2 banks.
Any opinions/advice between these 3 banks? we are still to visit Fribourg cantonal bank and Valiant. Anyone had dealings with either these?

My experience with these banks was that Raffeisen wouldn't let us make the entire mortgage variable and wanted us to fix at least half. Coop, Migros and Die Post were strict on their 20% deposit rule. UBS wanted another 1% for the 2nd mortage and for us to repay in 11 years. Credit Suisse gave us a discount off the published interest rate and we paid only a 13% deposit. We pledged all our Pillar 3 and withdrew from the 2nd Pillar AND they gave us a 3rd mortgage (payable in 6 months) so we didn't need to bring more money from the UK.

paddyg,

one distinction to make is that the post is not a bank! it is still fully supported/covered/owned by the Federal government. and as such the client is the most important element, not the 'banks' profits! although the government like to see a profit of course.

I have been with the post all my time here, 6 years! and have to say that in every respect all my dealings with them have been first class. opening hours of some of the branches is a bit weird but that's a swiss thing!

they seem to pick and choose who THEY do their business with to get the best deals for their clients. their e-trading system is that of BCV in vaud; their investment funds seem to be on the UBS platform; and I believe that the 3a accounts are actually under UBS. Funnily enough you might actually be getting a UBS mortgage rebranded and a bit knocked off by the post!

But as your contracts are with post, the federal protection covers everything.

i am about to embark on the mortgage hunt myself and my first stop was going to be the post. after that perhaps a few just for comparison but i fully expect to close a deal with them for that too.

bill

I am very impressed with PostFinance and have "banked" with them for decades. Nevertheless, I must point out that the products they outsource are not protected by the Swiss Government. The PostFinance is then only an agent.

However, a mortgage is money borrowed. The borrower need not worry about the solvency of the lender.

[posibble post tangent/hijacking here, sorry]

hmmm... that's an interesting point. but the services are accounts IN postfinance. the e-trading account has a postfinance front end and you have a post custody. but the platform/brokerage is actually running as far as i can tell is in BCV. stocks/shares/funds are a bad example but I was under the impression that this would be covered by the federal protection.

We went with UBS because we bank with them, but we did do the rounds of the other banks and then went back to UBS to play them off against each other. UBS were quite willing to match any other offer, and in the end we got a pretty good discount on the published rates.

Nick.

Tried the service in homegate.ch? Had no call back yet from the company I selected? We used UBS for our first place, did not really shop around at all. Talking to UBS about getting another place and well they not really interested...