PostFinance E-Trading vs Smartbroker+ — which broker is better?

Pros

• PostFinance Ltd holds a Swiss banking licence, is wholly owned by Swiss Post and has been designated a systemically important bank by FINMA — an unusually strong counterparty for a retail brokerage account
• CHF 18 of trading credits every quarter exactly offsets the CHF 18 quarterly custody fee, so a lightly traded account pays no ongoing platform cost
• Brokerage starts at CHF 6 for SIX orders up to CHF 500, which is competitive for genuinely small tickets and savings-plan style investing
• Access to more than 20 venues including SIX, BX Swiss, Xetra, Frankfurt, Euronext Paris/Amsterdam/Brussels, Borsa Italiana, Madrid, Vienna, Nasdaq OMX, the LSE, NYSE, NASDAQ and Toronto
• Fully integrated with e-finance and the PostFinance App: instant funding from your everyday account, one login, automatic Swiss tax statement and withholding-tax documentation
• Over 20 cryptocurrencies with Swiss custody at 0.95% trading fee and a 0.15% annual portfolio fee, plus ETH staking — unusual for a mainstream retail bank
• ETF and equity savings plans from CHF 1 per execution with fractional trading, at 1% per execution
• Four-language support with a dedicated e-trading order desk open until 10 p.m. Swiss time on weekdays

Cons

• Mid-size orders are expensive: CHF 30 on a CHF 10,000 SIX order is 0.30%, and USD 35 on a USD 10,000 US order is 0.35% — several times what specialist brokers charge for the same execution
• The currency conversion cost is not disclosed as a percentage anywhere in the published price list, which makes the true cost of buying US or euro-denominated securities impossible to calculate in advance
• No options, no futures, no forex, no CFDs and no margin: the product range stops at shares, ETFs, funds, bonds, structured products, warrants and crypto
• The trading interface is an e-banking module, not a trading platform — no depth of book, no advanced order types, no serious charting and no API
• Debit interest on the e-trading account runs at 9.50% per year while credit interest is zero, so an accidental overdraft is punitive
• Effectively Swiss-residents-only, with no demo account and no way to evaluate the platform before opening a banking relationship

Pros

• EUR 0.00 order commission on gettex for shares, bonds, ETFs, ETPs and funds from EUR 500 of order value, and EUR 1.00 below that
• 29 exchange venues plus eight OTC issuer desks - all German exchanges and eighteen foreign ones, so most securities can be bought on their home market in the home currency
• Genuinely broad range: roughly 40,000 shares, 40,000 bonds, 2,500 ETFs, 18,000 funds at net asset value and 4.6 million derivatives
• More than 10,800 savings plans on shares, ETFs, ETCs, funds and crypto ETPs, all free, from EUR 1.00 up to EUR 5,000 per instalment, at monthly to half-yearly intervals
• Zinskonto pays 2.25% p.a. variable up to EUR 100,000 and 2.00% from EUR 100,000 to EUR 1m, indexed to the ECB deposit facility rate
• VIP tiers trigger automatically at 45, 1,500 and 6,000 trades a quarter, cutting Tradegate and L&S to EUR 1-2 and including the EUR 29.90-a-month trading API
• Baader Bank as custodian means the full German tax service: automatic Abgeltungsteuer and church tax, Freistellungsauftrag, loss offsetting, Vorabpauschale, US withholding relief and Swiss tax vouchers
• Free custody, free sub-accounts, free foreign-currency accounts, free deposits and withdrawals, no inactivity fee

Cons

• The zero-commission promise applies to exactly one venue above one order size; Xetra costs EUR 4 plus 0.01%, Nasdaq EUR 4 plus 0.02% with a USD 8 minimum, and a small foreign order can easily cost EUR 12-15
• Crypto at 0.90% of market value plus the venue mark-up is expensive against German rivals charging a fraction of that for equivalent spot exposure
• The October 2023 migration from DAB to Baader Bank produced weeks of malfunctions and unreachable support; Finanztip pulled its recommendation until October 2024 and legacy DAB accounts that never moved now pay about EUR 9 per German exchange order
• Support is German-language business hours only, and the published fee list includes some hostile line items - EUR 100 for a copy of a recorded call, EUR 100 an hour for an address trace
• Onboarding is app-only and requires iOS 16 or Android 10 or newer; there is no browser-only route in
• The published Konditionen page and the July 2026 price list disagree on at least one venue charge (Stockholm: 0.03% versus 0.10%), which is not what you want from a fee schedule