If you want to hold people's serious money and not play money, understand that priority #1 is not growth or expense ratios - it's risk mitigation. Swiss banks are notoriously expensive and have terrible investment products that hold trillions because of their obsession with protecting capital.

As a startup, you must figure out how to convince ordinary people to change their family safety net. Full transparency, audits by a known firm, and an entire brochure/mini-site explaining every significant fintech failure, showing how my money would remain safe if that scenario happened again.

> Swiss banks are notoriously expensive and have terrible investment products that hold trillions because of their obsession with protecting capital.

What? Their second largest bank, Credit Suisse, imploded only last year. They hold trillions because of their nominal neutrality (though their cooperation with western sanctions against Russians appears to be hurting this significantly) and banking secrecy laws that serve as shelter for proceeds for all sorts of crimes.

Typically, when referring to “Swiss banks” people in the industry refer to the likes of Pictet/Lombard/Baer. Credit Suisse was closer to Bank of America than a Swiss bank.

Nomenculture aside, depositors did not lose a single cent in that implosion, and it went smoother than the SVB one.