Yuh Review 2021: A new mobile banking service

Yuh

In May 2021, PostFinance and Swissquote launched the Yuh service. They are trying to unify banking and trading services together. In addition, they want to unify paying, saving and investing (both in the stock market and in cryptocurrencies).

An interesting fact about Yuh is that they will share some of their profits in the form of their own cryptocurrency: the Swissqoins.

It is important to note that Yuh is not a bank itself. However, for the customers, it does not make much difference. Indeed, your money will be held by Swissquote, which is a bank. It means your money will be insured up to 100’000 CHF, the basic deposit protection as other Swiss banks.

I have no idea how they came up with this name. My guess was that it was the cheapest three-letter domain that was available. I have no idea how to pronounce (everything I tried just sounds utterly horrible). But this is highly suggestive and should not matter much for choosing a service.

So, overall, Yuh is trying to bring a lot of new things! But does that make them any good? Let’s see about that!

Features

As mentioned before, Yuh acts as both a bank and investment platform. So, we need to look at both banking and trading features.

Banking Features

For banking features, Yuh has all the basic features you can expect: you can pay your bills with the app and transfer money to and from your account. Currently, you can do transfers in CHF and EUR. You will get a Debit Mastercard to do your payments and withdraw money in Switzerland and abroad. You can also pay online with the card with CHF and EUR.

The interesting thing about Yuh is that you get access to a multi-currency account. It means you can actually receive and keep other currencies in your account. So, for instance, you could receive EUR and keep them in your account. So, when you have to pay in EUR, it will directly use that balance instead of converting from CHF to EUR.

You can also do peer-to-peer transfers to other users of the application. This is good if you know other users of the app. They also have the usual bunch of features like savings goals that I do not see any use for. These things are present in most digital banks.

But that’s about it as features go. For instance, with Yuh, you cannot currently use eBill or pay with Google Pay or Apple Pay. They also have no TWINT support. For people that like to pay with their phones, this is going to be an issue. Also, not being able to pay online with USD is a big deal for me. For me, a multi-currency card that is not able to use USD is pretty much useless. I pay online with USD much more often than with EUR:

Trading Features

Yuh is quite limited in terms of investment features. You can invest in about 100 different stocks. As for ETFs, you can currently invest in 5 ETFs. Again, this is a very limited choice that I hope they will increase in the future. Here are the 5 ETFs available:

• Global Blue Chips: Vanguard Total World (VT)
• European Blue Chips: Lyxor EURO STOXX 50
• Gold: ZKB Gold ETF
• Swiss Blue Chips: iShares SMI (CSSMI)
• US Blue Chips: SPDR S&P 500 (SPY)

I cannot understand why they would call them blue chips. VT contains all the stocks from the World stock market, not only blue chips. And even for the U.S., SPY also contains all the stocks from the U.S. stock market, not only blue chips. So I think it is bad to imply blue chips that means safety for many people. If they wanted blue chips, they should have taken the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an actual index of so-called blue chips.

As for the ETFs themselves, the choice is fairly okay, but it is difficult to judge from only 5 ETFs. However, this should suffice for many people. Interestingly, they provide access to U.S. ETFs. I hope it will last.

Finally, Yuh also gives you access to some cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum. In total, you have access to 13 cryptocurrencies, which should be enough for most people. It is not clear whether you can actually have proper wallet security, but I would expect not.

Yuh Fees

After looking at the features, we need to look at the fees offered by Yuh. Since yuh is both a banking package and an investment package, we will need to cover both.

It is very important to note that the pricing will change in 2022. Currently, the pricing is only available for 2021. Therefore, I will cover first the current pricing and then cover the future prices.

Banking fees

Let’s start with the banking fees of Yuh.

The basic operations are all free:

• Paying for your bills
• Transfer money to and from your account in CHF
• Paying in Switzerland with the Debit Mastercard
• Free transfers in EUR in the EEA zone
• Peer-to-peer payment in the application

For withdrawals, you will get one free withdrawal per week in Switzerland. Subsequent withdrawals will cost 1.90 CHF. If you withdraw money abroad, you will pay 4.90 CHF.

However, you will only be able to withdraw 1000 CHF per day and at most 10’000 CHF per month. This should be good per month, but this could be an issue per day. They did not communicate any payment limit.

Now comes the expensive part: currency exchange! Yuh is charging 0.95% per currency exchange. This means that all your operations in a foreign currency will cost you 0.95%. This is funny because they claim transaction fees are free in 12 currencies, but you have to pay the currency exchange, so it is not really free. It is all about marketing… And if you do any operation on currencies not included on the app, you will have to pay 1.50%!

If you have more than 100’000 CHF on your account, you will have to pay 0.75% in negative interest rate for the assets higher than that. And 0.50% for assets more than 100’000 EUR.

For me, the currency exchange fee makes Yuh highly unattractive. Currently, there are several interesting alternatives with free payments in foreign currencies and comparable features for the banking side.

Trading fees

Let’s look at the trading fees of Yuh now.

First, there are no custody fees. This means you will not pay anything for keeping your account open without doing anything. This is a good feature!

Then, the transaction fees are really simple:

• 0.5% fee for the stock market with a minimum fee of 1 CHF
• 1.0% fee for cryptocurrencies without a minimum

If we compare with other Swiss brokers, these fees are relatively cheap for small operations on the stock market. But they are expensive for large operations. For instance:

• A 1000 CHF investment will cost you 5 CHF which is cheap
• A 10’000 CHF investment will cost you 50 CHF, which is expensive

On top of that, you will also pay currency exchange fees of 0.95% for each of your operations with currencies you do not have. For instance, if you have only CHF and want to buy something in USD, you will pay a 0.95% fee. This is quite expensive.

I am unsure whether you can keep your dividends in foreign currencies or not. If you cannot, you will pay this fee for dividends, so you will lose 0.95% of your USD dividends (or other currencies. If you can, you will only pay this if you want to convert them back to CHF.

Of course, you will have to pay the management fees of the ETFs. This is logical, and it is the same for each broker.

Overall, Yuh’s fees are not great. But if we compare Yuh to other Swiss brokers, they are not terrible. For small operations, they will be reasonable, but for large operations, they are quite bad.

Future packages (2022)

As mentioned before, Yuh will introduce new pricing schemes in 2022. There will be three packages available:

• Flirt: A free account
• Kiss: An account at 4.90 CHF per month
• Love: An account at 7.90 CHF per month

Unfortunately, they have shared no information about any of these packages. So, for now, we just have to expect that the pricing will change in the future. I think this is a disadvantage since choosing Yuh now may lead to a more expensive account in the future.

Swissqoins

A unique feature of Yuh is its Swissqoin (SWQ). Swissqoin is a new cryptocurrency token that only exists within Yuh.

There are several ways of earning SWQ:

• By depositing 500 CHF in your account when you open it, you will get 500 SWQ
• By referring another user, you will get 500 SWQ
• By making a trade on Yuh, you will get 10 SWQ
• By paying with your Mastercard, you will get 2 SWQ

You can either redeem them for cash, send them to other Yuh users or keep them in your account.

Currently, one SWQ is worth 0.01 CHF (1 cent). There are 200 million Swissqoins, backed by a 2 million CHF reserve account. But this reserve account is expected to grow with time. Indeed, Yuh will reinvest 10% of its revenues into Swissqoin every month. Now, they say it is only 10% of the subscription revenues. However, there are currently no subscriptions, and there will not be any until 2022. So, the way I am reading that is that they will not reinvest anything before 2022, at least.

Personally, I do not see any value in that cryptocurrency thing. I would rather have a hard cashback or fee reductions on the operations rather than this gimmick.

Yuh advantages

We can summarize the advantages of Yuh:

• Free EUR bank account
• Multi-currency account
• No custody fees
• Cheap fees for small trading operations
• Access to U.S. ETFs
• The money is kept safe by Swissquote
• Backed by two large institutions

Yuh Disadvantages

Let’s summarize the disadvantages of Yuh

• Not possible to pay in USD, only EUR, and CHF
• Pricing will change in 2022
• Expensive currency exchange fees
• Very limited choice of ETFs
• Expensive trading fees for large trading operations
• No support for e-bills
• No support for Apple Pay or Google Pay
• Horrible name
• Unclear marketing
• Confusing pricing

Conclusion

Yuh is an interesting idea, but I do not see the usefulness of this offer currently. One interesting point is that they offer both banking features and trading features. This is good if you want to use a single account. But they are the best at neither. So, having a single account with them would be a big compromise on the features and the fees.

Also, Yuh currently lacks too many features to be interesting. For instance, they are a multi-currency account, but you cannot pay with USD. Also, their currency exchange rates are actually very high compared to other actors in the market. Or, they claim to be modern and digital, but they have no Google Pay nor Apple Pay support. And they only offer 5 ETFs to invest in.

So, overall, Yuh feels like an unfinished product at this stage. It may change in the future, but currently, I do not see a use for it. If you want a good digital bank, you can use Neon and save on fees abroad. If you want a good Swiss broker, you can use Swissquote and have many more features. And if you want a multi-currency account with a lot of support and better fees, you can use Wise or Revolut and have better fees.

What about you? What do you think of Yuh?