PostFinance E-Trading vs finanzen.net ZERO — 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, and the Swiss tax statement ordered directly in e-trading (CHF 97.30)
• 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 shares, ETFs, funds, certificates and warrants, with no custody fee, no third-party cost surcharge and no venue fee
• Savings plans in shares, ETFs and funds cost EUR 0.00 from EUR 1.00 per instalment and carry no minimum-quantity surcharge
• Best-rated app in the German neobroker field - roughly 4.7 out of 5 across about 26,000 German App Store ratings - with limit, stop, stop-limit, trailing stop-loss and OCO orders
• Trading is embedded in finanzen.net, Germany's largest retail finance portal, so quotes, news and instrument data sit beside the order ticket at no extra cost
• Extended hours: securities from 07:30 to 23:00 on weekdays and 14:00 to 19:00 on Saturdays, crypto 24/7
• Real spot crypto in the same account - 59 coins held by BaFin-supervised Tangany GmbH in Germany, plus more than 50 crypto ETPs including staking products
• Junior account on identical terms with no running costs, and Swiss share trading is supported
• Full German tax handling through Baader Bank: automatic Abgeltungsteuer, Freistellungsauftrag, loss offsetting and annual tax documents

Cons

• One trading venue only. Every order goes to gettex, so you cannot compare quotes, and outside Xetra core hours (09:00-17:30) the spread is the entire cost of your trade with nothing to benchmark it against
• No telephone support of any kind - the only channel is a ticket system inside the login, which Finanztip also flags as the reason ZERO scores mid-table on service
• The Fair Use Policy explicitly reserves the right to terminate clients for automated or high-frequency trading, latency arbitrage, 'economically pointless' transactions, or simply never funding the account
• Crypto costs 1.0% of order value in commission (0.5% brokerage plus 0.5% settlement) on top of the spread, and coins can be neither deposited nor withdrawn - the wallet is a closed system
• Three-company structure: finanzen.net zero GmbH is only a tied agent with no licence, DonauCapital Wertpapier GmbH carries the liability, and Baader Bank holds the assets. It is legal and disclosed, but there is no single accountable balance sheet
• No individual bonds, no joint or second accounts, no business accounts, no demo account, and uninvested cash pays 0.00% p.a.