Ok, I can definitely advise on this beacuse I had the same exact situation with ZKB and IB.

The information that you received was likely for a Citi account with headquarters in London, England. The account itself should be a CHF account. If this is not the case then ignore the following....

Yes, you can do a SEPA payment to this bank and indeed through ebanking. You will be sending Swiss francs to this account (remember the IB account is in Swiss francs) so no worries about the bank exchange rate.

Now in my case, I started using IB in November of 2013. At that time up until the end of 2014, I was being charged 4 CHF per transfer by ZKB. At the start of this year, they bumped it up to 20 CHF per transaction. I found this to be completely ridiculous for a SEPA payment. There is luckily a workaround for this. I now deposit to a company called currency fair, which offers a swiss account so the transfer is free. From there I transfer to IB for a fee of around 2.5 CHF. It is somewhat more inconvenient, but the savings do add up.

That's great! Thanks for your response. Yes, it's exactly the same situation with the Citi account in London. I'll set up a Currencyfair account.

You may want to announce the deposit with IB (in Account Management), it may simplify and speed up things for IB, even though IB says xfers arriving before 4pm local time (hopefully memory serves) are processed and booked the same day. You can save that form for further use.

Note that IB charges interest on CHF balances:
0% up to 100k
0.5% 100k to 1mln
1.0% above

thx kiwiguy08 for the currencyfair tip

Concerning the fee that currency fair charges for the tranfer, there is a further trick that needs to be used.

They actually charge 4 CHF for the transfer. However, the fee depends on the currency you use to pay the fee. If paying in ZAR (south african rand) the fee is actually 25 ZAR. (about 1.81 CHF). The trick is to convert a small amount of money to ZAR. Every 4 months I buy 100 ZAR which gives me transfers for 4 months. The exchange rate is very good too.

So I think the answer to how to declare dividends and profits done with interactive brokers in Switzerland is still unanswered. Am I right? This is a major blocker for me at the moment.

I earn a bit less than 120k so I'm not supposed to do my tax form. Would I need to start to do it if I use this platform? If I need to use this tax form, do I need to report all dividends and transactions made during the entire year?

Yes, on the same boat.

It would be nice to know what a non-US citizen has done regarding tax wittholding and how much they were able to get back, if something at all.

All of it, then pay Swiss tax.

can you please explain the procedure? The form to get the money back and the form to pay taxes in CH.

You fill in a tax return & the additional pages for foreign dividends with withholding tax.

So I need to fill the tax return even if I earn less than 120k.
Do I need to list all dividends received or just a sum?

If your declaring other assets yes.

Interactive Brokers is terrible, one of the worse customer service in the industry, people there seems to be working in a terrible company. Just try to chat with someone that is not from Sales department and you will experience it. They have 0 patience.

Interactive Brokers is mainly used by non retail traders so most people using IB use it via their own software so they don't have to deal with that terrible software. However if you trade often which does not seems to be your case it has low fees.

If you won't trade ofter TD Ameritrader is better since it will provide you all data for free with higher commission cost. in IB you have to pay 30usd for basic date if you don't trade enough.
TD has a way more moder platform with ThinkOrSwim.

So if you are going to do a couple of buy/sells a year TD is best if you will be doing 10+ trades a months IB

I never had any bad experience with the IB service desk. Quite the contrary, they were quite capable in answering even fairly technical questions.

So I also have ZKB, and I don't want to pay the 20CHF fee. Btw if I start a SEPA transfer I can't see the fee anywhere. Is it applied only when you confirm?

Anyway since I didn't want to risk paying 20CHF, I used the CurrencyFair trick. It worked twice, but yesterday they rejected it. This is what they said when I asked for explanation:

"Unfortunately we cannot allow you to transfer funds through CurrencyFair unless there is an exchange of currencies as part of the transaction. I realise that you have managed to do this successfully on two occasions in the past, however we received an automated alert this time due to the fact that this is your third transfer with no exchange."

You've never had such issue?

ZKB is probably the least transparent bank when it comes to fees. You dont see the fee until the payment has cleared. If i didnt control all sent payments i wouldnt have noticed that the fee went up from 4 to 20 chf.

I haven't received this message from CF yet.

Let me bump this thread, there might be someone who is experiencing the same doubts.

I have a UBS account in CHF and I'm looking for a solution that minimises cost in terms of:
1) CHF to CHF: IB offers a CHF account if not mistaken, right?

2) CHF denominated products: what is the offer (ETF specifically) in CHF? I would like to avoid any CHF-XXX exchange to minimise the Fx costs and not being exposed to another currency. Any experience here?

3) Guarantee: Who is owning the company? In theory, you buy any kind of product (Stocks, Bonds etc) and the company goes bankrupt, customers should not be affected because they are owner of certain products that can be transferred among banks/brokers. Is the same for IB?

I'll take a stab at answering some of these questions....

1) You pick your main currency, and all losses and gains are calculated in this currency. This is for visual simplicity. For example if my main currency is USD and my swiss stock gains 1 CHF, IB would display a gain of 1.03 USD. The stock is still in CHF, the dividends are in CHF, just the tracker is in USD. You can deposit in pretty much all the main currencies that you wish and it will list your balance of each currency you have in account. You dont get an ATM card to withdraw, you have to withdraw to a bank account. I have an account in the US, in Switzerland, and in the EU room and I love IBs ability to move money between all three. You get one free withdrawal each month and it costs real money after that. (1 USD to do an ACH deposit to a US bank and 8 CHF to deposit to a Swiss bank)

2)I havent traded any Swiss ETFs so I am not sure if you can. I would very much expect them to. I havent seen anything that cant be traded on there yet.

3) Its an American company and is covered by American bank guarantees. Up to $500,000 in securities value is covered ($250,000 if just cash) and I think they also have additional insurance up to 30 million.

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/e...Strength&p=acc

Partially wrong question/logic:

When you buy securities you own them. Even while they're deposited in some securites account you still own them. It doesn't matter if IB goes belly-up: They're yours and will be transferred fairly easily to another broker even during bankruptcy proceedings, though in such an event transfer may take a bit longer, not sure. This is subject to country-specific laws, it does apply to CH and US, probably to all EU contries as well. In Switzerland these client-owned assets are called "Sondervermögen", no idea about the English term.

Cash (currency doesn't matter) in a broker account however, as well as structured products issued by your broker, is a credit by you to your broker. In case of bankruptcy all credit that exceeds the protected amount becomes part of the assets used to pay the liabilities, they become part of what's called Konkursmasse in German. That may well mean the credit amount is lost.

Thanks all for the answers, very helpful!

I use IB, have CH as the base CCY, transfered easily from my bank account to broker account. I buy CHF ETFs traded at SIX.


I'd recommend IB.