Gestion de fortune : les frais sont la partie facile

A Swiss comparison site has put a price on the country’s wealth managers, and the answer is clear enough to act on. It is also incomplete, and the study says so itself, in its own methodology note. Every managed portfolio carries three costs. A published table can measure one of them.

By Mattia Scolaro, Chief Client Officer, Alpian

Last verified: August 2026

On 27 August 2026, the comparison service moneyland.ch published its 2026 wealth management study. It priced one year of discretionary management at 16 Swiss providers, across three portfolio sizes, CHF 100’000, CHF 500’000 and CHF 1 million, and three risk profiles: up to 30 percent equities, 40 to 60 percent, and above 80 percent. The figures combine the flat management fee with the average product cost of the instruments used, expressed as the total expense ratio.

The providers analysed were Alpian, Bank Cler, Basler Kantonalbank, Descartes, Findependent, Finpension, Luzerner Kantonalbank, Migros Bank, Postfinance, Raiffeisen, Selma, Sparkasse Schwyz, Swissquote, True Wealth, Valiant and Viac.

Two large names are absent. The study notes that providers unable to supply an average TER per risk profile could not be included, and lists UBS and Zürcher Kantonalbank among them. That is a methodological constraint rather than a verdict, but it says something about how hard comparable cost disclosure still is in this industry. The sixteen providers who did supply their numbers deserve credit for that. We were one of them, and we would rather be measured than exempt.

Here are the cheapest offers in each category, at each portfolio size. All figures are Swiss francs per year.

CHF 100’000

CHF 500’000

CHF 1 million

Two results in those tables are moneyland’s, not ours, and they deserve to be stated plainly. At CHF 500’000 and at CHF 1 million, Alpian is the least expensive provider in Switzerland that assigns a dedicated advisor, in every one of the three risk profiles. Not competitive with. First. And the margin is not narrow: against the traditional bank mandates ranked below us on the same list, our total cost comes in between 38 and 52 percent lower.

That last figure is the one I find most satisfying, and not for the obvious reason. Alpian has been saying publicly for some time that our mandates are priced around 40 percent below comparable traditional offerings. Until this week that was our own claim about ourselves. It is now a range calculated by a neutral comparison service from numbers every provider submitted on the same basis. Only the second one counts.

Five years ago the settled view in Swiss banking was that this combination could not be made to work economically: a named advisor, an institutional-quality mandate, and a total cost that sits closer to the algorithms than to the banks. At CHF 500’000 we are CHF 1’400 a year above the cheapest fully automated offer and CHF 2’650 below the next traditional mandate. The tables above are an independent comparison site reporting that the thing can in fact be done.

Read down those columns and one more detail about our pricing shows up, one we have never made much noise about. Alpian charges the same whether a portfolio holds 20 percent equities or 90 percent. CHF 1’000 at CHF 100’000, CHF 3’750 at CHF 500’000, CHF 7’500 at CHF 1 million, flat across all three risk profiles. Almost every other provider in the study charges more as the equity share rises. There is no good reason for a client to pay a higher management fee for accepting more risk, so we do not charge one.

The most useful thing in this study is not a single number. It is the fact that moneyland could not publish one ranking.

To compare these providers honestly, they had to split the list in two: the cheapest offers without a fixed contact person, and the cheapest offers with one. That split is an admission that the Swiss market sells two different products under one word.

The first is an execution service. You choose a risk profile, an algorithm builds and rebalances a portfolio of index instruments, and it does that job well and very cheaply. The second is a relationship. Someone knows your situation, your currencies, your pension, your business, the year you plan to buy a house and the year you intend to stop working, and the portfolio is one output of that conversation rather than the whole of it.

Both are legitimate. Plenty of people need only the first, and paying for the second when you do not need it is waste. But because moneyland published both lists side by side, we can now do something the Swiss industry has avoided for a century. We can price the human being.

Between CHF 44 and CHF 233 a month. That is what a dedicated advisor now costs, measured by a neutral comparison site using its own numbers.

Hold that against how this market has always worked. The traditional private banking minimum sat at a million francs and frequently well above it, and that threshold was never a judgment about who deserves advice. It was arithmetic. An advisor’s hour cost the bank roughly the same whether the client brought CHF 300’000 or CHF 3 million, so the only way to make the hour profitable was to reserve it for the largest portfolios. Everyone below the line was priced out, not turned away.

Technology did not remove the advisor. It removed the reason the advisor had to be rationed. When software carries onboarding, compliance, reporting and preparation, the fixed cost of serving a client drops, and the part clients value most becomes deliverable far below the old threshold. The first wave of digital finance concluded from this that the human could be taken out entirely. I think that was the wrong conclusion, and the two lists in this study are the evidence. What technology did was not replace the advisor. It made the advisor affordable.

On this measure the study is right and the direction is one way. A flat fee above 1 percent, on a mandate built mostly from index instruments, gets harder to defend every year. At CHF 1 million with a high equity share, the study’s own table runs from CHF 7’500 to CHF 15’500 among the five cheapest offers with an advisor, a spread of more than two to one, and that is before the providers who could not supply their numbers at all.

Alpian’s investment mandates are priced from 0.5 to 0.75 percent, with a minimum of CHF 2’000. That is what the study measured, and we are comfortable being measured on it.

It is also the least interesting of the three costs in this article. A fee is a price, not a value. What sits inside it, and what has been left outside it, tells you more.

Under every table, moneyland prints the boundary of its own work: the figures do not take account of foreign currency charges, exchange fees or stamp duties.

I want to give that sentence more credit than it usually gets. Those costs depend on how a portfolio is traded in practice, and no comparison service can model them for every client, so excluding them is the correct call. Stating the exclusion in plain type under every single table is the part most of this industry does not do about its own pricing. It also tells the reader exactly where the next question begins. Three layers sit just outside that frame, and in one case the number is larger than anything in the ranking.

Stamp duty. Switzerland levies a securities transfer tax on most purchases and sales through a Swiss bank or broker. In practice the investor pays 0.075 percent on Swiss securities and 0.15 percent on foreign ones, deducted automatically. Small per trade, unavoidable, and a function of turnover, which means a mandate that trades more costs more and no fee table will show you that. Details in our explainer on Swiss stamp duty.

Exchange fees. Charged per venue and per transaction, again driven by turnover rather than by the headline fee.

Currency conversion, which is the one that matters. A properly diversified Swiss portfolio is not a Swiss portfolio. Most of the world’s investable equity is denominated in dollars, euros, yen and sterling. Every initial purchase, every rebalance, every dividend that comes home crosses a currency line, and each crossing is priced by a spread that appears in no fee comparison anywhere.

The arithmetic is uncomfortable. Take the CHF 500’000 portfolio from table 2, with 70 percent of its assets in foreign currency, so CHF 350’000 has to be converted. At a mark-up of around 1.69 percent, closer to the industry norm than most clients realise, that single conversion costs about CHF 5’915. At Alpian’s rate of 0.20 percent it costs CHF 700.

The gap is roughly CHF 5’200. The entire annual cost of the mandate in that same table is CHF 3’750. One currency conversion, in year one, before a single rebalance, can cost more than a year and a half of the fee everyone is busy comparing.

This is an illustration with stated assumptions, not a promise. The real figure moves with allocation and with provider. But a cost of that size sits entirely outside the table that ranks the providers, and it is invisible by design, because it is priced into an exchange rate rather than charged as a fee.

The study’s exclusion note matters because a good comparison invites the next question instead of closing it. The ranking tells you what a mandate costs to hold. What it costs to run depends on how much of your portfolio has to cross a currency line, and that is a question to put to every provider on both lists, including us.

Before the arithmetic, the sentence I hear most often.

I sit in a lot of first conversations. I have had hundreds of them. And almost nobody opens with what does this cost. They open with some version of I know I should have started earlier. Sometimes there is an amount attached, a savings account that has been sitting at roughly the same number for eleven years, maybe longer. They say it with a small laugh, looking at their hands. It is not funny, because they are right.

Not one of those people lacked income or intelligence. They lacked time, or a starting point, or the confidence that they would not get it wrong. Three separate problems, and a cheaper fee solves none of them.

The industry does have a favourite way of pricing investor behaviour. Morningstar’s 2026 Mind the Gap study found that over the decade to the end of 2025, US funds returned 9.9 percent a year while the average dollar invested in them earned 8.7 percent, a gap of 1.2 percentage points caused by money arriving and leaving at the wrong moments.

I am not going to lean on that number, because it is contested. In May 2026 a paper in the Financial Analysts Journal re-ran the same sample and concluded that poor timing costs fund investors closer to 0.10 percent a year. When the two best available estimates differ by a factor of twelve, an investment professional who quotes the flattering one is selling, not arguing.

So take the part nobody disputes, and it is specific to this country. In moneyland’s own 2025 investor survey of 1’500 people, 79 percent held a savings account and 38 percent held ETFs. The dominant financial position in Switzerland is not a badly timed portfolio. It is cash.

Twenty years of a portfolio you never built does not appear as a fee. It appears in no comparison, including this one. And for most Swiss households it is by a wide margin the largest number in the entire discussion. A mandate at CHF 470 a year that you postpone for six years costs more than a mandate at CHF 1’000 a year that you started.

Two engines, one place

Wealth is not usually built the way private banking imagines it, with a large sum handed over once. For most people it is built by two ordinary engines running for years without drama.

The first is the money that is already there. Savings sitting in an account, losing purchasing power every year, put to work in a portfolio that matches the actual horizon.

The second is the salary. A fixed share of each month moved into the market automatically, before it can be spent, so that income itself becomes the machine rather than whatever happens to be left at the end of it.

Neither engine asks anyone to be wealthy before starting. Both ask for one thing that the traditional setup makes surprisingly hard: everyday money and long-term investments in the same place, connected. When salary, savings, currencies and pillar 3a sit under one roof, small decisions compound. When they sit at four different institutions, they mostly never get made at all.

That is why Alpian is a bank and not an investment app. It is also why we changed our own mind about who we are. We started as a digital private bank. What we found, over three years of client conversations, is that the people who needed us most were not the ones private banking was built for. They were the ones just underneath it: real money to manage, no time to manage it, no obvious place to go. Often no confidence they would get it right on their own. Being a bank rather than a product is what lets us run both engines for them instead of one.

The job of an advisor, then, stated plainly because the profession has spent decades implying something else: it is not to predict markets. It is to get the allocation right for the life it belongs to, to make sure both engines are running, and to be the reason someone stays invested on the day they most want to leave. An algorithm can rebalance. It cannot sit across from someone in a bad month and talk them out of the worst financial decision of their life, because it is not in the room. I have had those conversations. They do not follow a script, and they do not happen on a screen you can close.

There is an honest risk in everything I have just argued, and it is mine to fix.

Promising advice below the old thresholds is easy. Delivering it at consistent quality once there are thousands of clients rather than dozens is the part that breaks. It breaks quietly. Service decays a little at a time, nobody files a complaint, and the fee stays exactly where it was. Every attempt at democratising advice in financial history has failed in that same direction. I think about this more than I think about markets.

So we wrote the standard down. We call it Alpian Excellence. It is not a poster in a corridor. It is the set of non-negotiables the whole bank is held to, and the thing I am accountable for more than any portfolio.

The non-negotiables

• Guiding, not pushing. We advise responsibly, offer only what is suitable, and respect the client’s decision.
• Empathy and humanity. We listen, we understand, and then we advise. In good markets and bad ones.
• Teamwork. One team, one set of standards for everyone at Alpian.
• Excellence for all, from all. Every client receives the same level of attention, regardless of size or profile.
• Professionalism is not optional. Ownership, reliability and consistency, in every channel.
• Personalisation. Every interaction is prepared, and relevant to that person’s actual situation.

One of those deserves to be read directly against the study that prompted this article. Excellence for all, from all: the same attention regardless of size. Now look at how a fee comparison has to be organised, by CHF 100’000, CHF 500’000 and CHF 1 million, and you can see the assumption this industry has run on for a century. Attention is a function of assets. We refuse that assumption, and refusing it is harder and more expensive than lowering a minimum, which is why much of the market has lowered minimums instead.

Underneath the principles sit behaviours that are deliberately small, because small and checkable is what gets kept. Be prepared on someone’s situation before the call rather than during it. Adapt to how that person prefers to be dealt with. Listen and stay present. Close every interaction by confirming that each of their points has been covered. Follow up quickly, and where there is nothing yet to report, say so rather than going quiet.

None of that is sophisticated. It is a bank writing down that it will prepare before it meets you, and that it will answer you. The reason it has to be written down is that for anyone below a million francs, the industry default was to do neither.

Whether it holds is measurable, and it is measured. Our advisory team currently holds a rating of 4.98 out of 5 from the clients they serve. Cost is one number. That is the other one, and I would not trade it for a lower fee.

At CHF 100’000 we do not come first. Sparkasse Schwyz’s ETF mandate does, at CHF 910 against our CHF 1’000 in the low equity profile. I would rather point at that myself than let three favourable tables speak for us.

The gap is CHF 90 a year. Seven francs fifty a month, for second place on a list where the next entrant costs CHF 1’320. I am comfortable with that, and Sparkasse Schwyz have built something genuinely good at that size.

The reason we are not first there is that we drew a threshold too. A dedicated advisor at Alpian is officially assigned from CHF 150’000, and moneyland footnoted the practical version: clients below that amount can be given access to a dedicated advisor on request. Every provider in this market draws that line somewhere. The traditional private banking line has historically sat around a million francs and often well above it. Ours sits at CHF 150’000, which is a difference of degree rather than of principle. We have not abolished the threshold. We have moved it down by a factor of roughly seven, and we intend to keep moving it.

If you are comparing providers this week, start with the study. It is the most rigorous public comparison of Swiss wealth management costs available, and it will get you most of the way. Three questions get you the rest.

The last question decides whether a fee was paying, and no price comparison can answer it. The numbers on the other side of the ledger belong in the same conversation. Our managed portfolios in a balanced risk profile returned 8.29 percent in 2025, net of all fees, against a Performance Watcher benchmark of 6.41 percent.* Over three years that places us in the top 20 percent of Swiss asset managers. Cost and outcome belong in the same sentence, and the cost half has just been measured properly, in public, by someone with no stake in the answer. That is a good week for Swiss clients.

A human advisor costs about CHF 117 a month at half a million francs. A savings account that never became a portfolio costs vastly more than that, every year, for as long as it lasts. The comparison everyone has been waiting for has been published. The larger one is still yours to make.

*Performance Watcher benchmark, balanced risk profile, 2025, net of fees. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.

How much does wealth management cost in Switzerland?

According to the 2026 moneyland.ch study, a CHF 500’000 mandate costs between about CHF 2’350 and CHF 7’750 a year among the five cheapest offers in each category, and at CHF 1 million the range runs from about CHF 4’100 to CHF 15’500. Flat fees at traditional banks are mostly above 1 percent, while digital providers charge considerably less. Alpian’s mandates are priced from 0.5 to 0.75 percent, which the study records as CHF 3’750 a year at CHF 500’000.

How much does a personal wealth advisor cost in Switzerland?

Comparing the two rankings in the 2026 moneyland study, the cheapest offer with a dedicated advisor costs CHF 530 a year more than the cheapest offer without one at CHF 100’000, CHF 1’400 more at CHF 500’000, and CHF 2’800 more at CHF 1 million. That is roughly CHF 44 to CHF 233 a month for a named person who knows your situation.

Which costs are missing from wealth management fee comparisons?

The moneyland study states under each table that foreign currency charges, exchange fees and stamp duties are not included. Currency conversion is usually the largest of the three, because a diversified Swiss portfolio holds most of its assets in foreign currencies and every conversion is priced through the exchange rate rather than charged as a visible fee.

I have savings but no time or confidence to invest. Do I need an advisor?

If the situation is one currency, one goal and a long horizon, an execution service does the job well and cheaply. An advisor earns the difference where the picture is more complicated, or where the obstacle is not knowledge but time, a starting point, or confidence. That last case is the most common one in Switzerland, and a lower fee does nothing to solve it. Alpian assigns a dedicated advisor from CHF 150’000, and every client can book sessions with a wealth advisor.

What is the minimum for wealth management in Switzerland?

Traditional private banking thresholds have historically sat around CHF 1 million and often higher. Digital providers start far lower. Alpian’s managed mandates start at CHF 2’000, with a dedicated advisor from CHF 150’000.

Sources: moneyland.ch, Wie teuer ist eine Schweizer Vermögensverwaltung? 2026 wealth management study, Dan Urner, 27 August 2026 (provider universe, tables 1 to 3, methodology and exclusions); moneyland.ch Swiss investment survey 2025 (savings account and ETF ownership, 1’500 respondents); Morningstar, Mind the Gap 2026 (investor return gap, decade to 31 December 2025); Fulkerson, Jordan, Riley and Yan, « Bad Timing Does Not Cost Investors 15% of Their Funds’ Returns », Financial Analysts Journal, Vol. 82 No. 3, May 2026; Swiss federal securities transfer tax rates, per Alpian, Swiss stamp duty explained; Alpian managed portfolio performance 2025, net of fees, balanced risk profile, versus Performance Watcher benchmark; three-year ranking among Swiss asset managers; advisory team client rating.