Opening a Swiss bank account without a permit

Why the English advice is so bad here

ch.ch, the official portal of the Confederation, cantons and communes, has no English page on opening a bank account at all. All 336 of its English pages were enumerated to check. The taxes-and-finances section covers taxation, pensions and debt enforcement only.

So the English field is occupied entirely by commercial relocation content, and the same handful of errors recur, because there is no official English anchor for anyone to cite.

The permit is nowhere required by law

The Anti-Money Laundering Act, Article 3, requires only “a document of evidentiary value”. It names no passport, no permit, no proof of address. FINMA's ordinance then delegates the operative detail to the banks' own code of conduct, CDB 20, which is binding on them through that delegation.

CDB 20 Article 7 requires the bank to document your name, first name, date of birth, nationality and actual domicile address. Note: the actual one, not a Swiss one. Article 9 accepts an official photo identification document — passport, identity card, driving licence or similar — and treats video identification as expressly equivalent.

So a residence permit is the bank's own risk-based evidence, not a legal requirement. That single fact explains why one bank turns you away and the next one opens the account, when neither is following a rule. For the same reason, “you must appear in person” is wrong: CDB 20 put video and online identification on an equal footing.

Two deadlines nobody publishes

CDB 20 Article 45 paragraph 4: missing documents must arrive within 30 days of the account being opened. If they do not, the bank blocks the relationship for all deposits and withdrawals, and must annul it if the documents cannot be produced. That is the legal reason a conditionally opened account goes dead after a month, and nobody tells you at the counter.

The AEOI Act, Article 11 paragraphs 7 to 9: a tax self-certification must arrive and be plausibility-checked within 90 days. Failing that, the institution must close the account or block all transfers.

Breaking the chicken-and-egg loop

The loop — no account without an address, no address without an account — is a practice loop, not a statutory one. No Swiss legal instrument requires a Swiss address to open an account.

What breaks it is the commune registration confirmation, an official document from a public authority evidencing your declared address. It satisfies the Article 7 duty on its face and long predates the plastic permit card.

The working sequence: enter on your passport, secure an address, register at the commune within 14 days as federal law requires, open the account on passport plus registration confirmation, and file the permit card later if asked.

One special case worth knowing: a rental deposit account. CDB 20 Article 18 letter b dispenses with identification of the contracting partner entirely where a rental surety account is opened for a property in Switzerland.

There is no right to an account, but it is not nothing either

Switzerland has no equivalent of the EU Payment Accounts Directive. Nothing in the Banking Act, the Anti-Money Laundering Act or the code of conduct creates a duty to contract, and a bank may decline without giving reasons.

The one statutory approximation is the Postal Services Act, Article 32, which requires a nationwide universal service in payment transactions, with the Postal Ordinance specifying an account plus transfers, deposits and withdrawals. But it covers only people already domiciled in Switzerland, only Swiss franc domestic payments — cross-border has been expressly excluded since 2021 — and it is subject to money laundering and reputational exclusion.

So anyone writing that Switzerland guarantees a basic account like the EU is wrong, and anyone writing that Switzerland has nothing at all is also wrong.