We Cannot Buy Trust

Gianmarco Bonaita co-founded Alpian in 2019 and has led it as CEO since 2023. Here he sets out why Alpian became a bank rather than an app, what four years in the market corrected, and what the affluent client in Switzerland actually needs.

By Gianmarco Bonaita, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Alpian

Last verified: September 2026

Between 2017 and 2019, inside the bank that incubated us, we kept returning to the same observation. Demand for quality banking services was rising. Access to them was getting harder.

That is not a complaint about private banking. It is a description of its economics. Serving a client properly costs money, so the industry set a threshold and served the people above it. The threshold is written nowhere, but below the level traditional private banking is built around, often a million francs and frequently well above, you are at the very low end of what it will take.

Which leaves a large group of people in a strange position. At some point in their life they start to have something aside. They begin to ask what they should do with it. And they rarely get an answer. Depending on which study you read, that is thirty to forty percent of the Swiss population.

They are not underserved because the industry dislikes them. They are underserved because nobody had built the cost structure that makes serving them viable. That is the gap Alpian was built for, and it is the argument set out in The forgotten middle.

We incorporated in October 2019. Three choices made around that time still define the bank today, and all three were harder than the alternatives.

First, we decided to be a bank ourselves. We could have built an application and rented a licence from someone else. Instead we applied to FINMA in our own name in April 2020 and had the licence in full force in May 2022. Roughly twenty-four months, and we built the bank while the authorisation process ran.

We did it that way for one reason. We cannot buy trust.

We cannot convince someone that they should trust us and have it happen. What we can do is bring quality products, quality service and credibility, so that people have the ingredients from which to build trust.

Holding our own banking licence is the first of those ingredients. It means we take responsibility for the whole relationship rather than for the part of it that sits in an app.

Second, we decided that humans stay in the proposition. This was 2019, before COVID, and it was not the fashionable position. Money is an emotional subject and it can be complex, and people want to talk to a person about it. That does not mean they want to talk to a person about everything.

So the balance we have built is this. Clients need to be able to act on their own at two in the morning or at five in the afternoon, with all the information they need. And they need to be able to reach a professional, in the main languages of Switzerland plus English, whenever the question is one that deserves a conversation.

Third, we decided to do everyday banking and wealth management together. Everyday banking is what our clients use daily and understand best. Wealth management answers a question that has often never been answered for them at all. Most institutions do one of those well. We thought the client needed both in the same place, and we still do.

Some of what we assumed turned out to be right. Two things did not, and they are the more interesting half.

Investing is an emotional decision, not only a financial one. We understood the theory. What we underestimated is what happens when the money in question is your own. Everything the financial theory says remains true, and at a certain point it still becomes an emotional choice, and that factor decides whether someone acts.

That is why we built an entry point at two thousand francs rather than defending our original minimum, and why we moved into pension. The third pillar is easier to begin with, because the tax advantage is concrete and the concept is already familiar.

And trust is built somewhere other than we expected. We have been at this since the bank was a piece of paper, and back then we treated everyday banking as an industry standard you simply had to have. Investing, we assumed, was where trust would be earned.

It turned out to be the other way round. An affluent client goes to the supermarket and to the restaurant every day. That is where the relationship is actually lived, and that is where trust gets built.

Which is why completing the everyday side has mattered more than it looks from the outside. It is not a commodity we added to look like a bank. It is the ground the rest of the relationship stands on.

We have passed forty thousand clients, roughly doubling after the Radicant portfolio transferred to us in April 2026.

But the client count is not the number that decides whether this business works. The one that does is how much of a client relationship is actually invested. In 2024, around seventeen percent of total client assets with us were invested. By July 2026 it was around thirty-four percent. Everyday banking has moved with it, with transacted volume up by more than half year on year.

On performance we took a position early. From the first day, when we had almost no track record to show, we benchmarked ourselves through Performance Watcher, which aggregates the results of Swiss wealth managers. At the end of 2025, for a balanced risk profile, we sit in the top twenty percent in Switzerland, net of all fees and costs.

We do not chase alpha and we do not pick stocks. We build portfolios for long-term value creation, with tactical adjustments that reflect the macroeconomic context without moving the core. And we publish where we stand, because if we are asking people to trust us with money, they are entitled to see how we actually perform.

It would be easy to file Alpian under neobank. The category is convenient and it is wrong.

A neobank competes to be the app in your pocket. It wins on convenience and it monetises scale. That is a real business and some of them are formidable, but it is not ours. In Switzerland it is also a crowded race for a small prize, because only a small fraction of the population uses a digital bank as their main institution.

We are not a traditional private bank either. The economics that set that threshold are exactly what we were built to avoid rebuilding.

We are a Swiss bank, with our own licence, built for the client who has something to look after and no obvious place to take it. Digital because that is how the cost structure works. Advisory because that is what the client actually needs.

If the technology is what people notice first, that is fine. But we want to be chosen for the advice at the centre of the relationship, not for the self-service around it.

The next step is from being our clients’ primary bank to being their financial advisory bank.

One question sits behind almost everything a person wants to know about their money, and it usually goes unanswered. How much will I have when I retire?

Answering that properly means more than holding the salary, the bills, the pillar 3a and a mandate in one place. It means helping someone understand their whole financial position and plan against the goals that matter to them, with the technology doing the work and a person available whenever judgment is required.

Building a Swiss bank is a capital investment, not an interface. It takes years before scale turns into profitability, and last year was the first in which our loss curve inverted. We have the plan and we have the capital to deliver it.

What we will not do is buy the trust in the meantime. We would rather earn it, one relationship at a time, the way it has actually worked so far.

Gianmarco Bonaita is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Alpian, the Swiss digital premium bank, based in Geneva. Alpian holds a Swiss banking licence granted by FINMA and is majority owned by Fideuram, Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking.

This column appears monthly on i-vest.