I'm bumping this up as I need to open an account in € in a French bank in nearby Ferney.

Any suggestions? Trying to find the simplest and cheapest way to receive payments in € that cannot be made in Switzerland. Internet operations mandatory.

I tried with the online-only banks but the ones I checked require that the holder resides in FR.

Thanks for any recommendation.

I use Credit Agricole (CA), as they have plenty of branches, a decent online site, and can also transfer a decent amount of money directly from CH with no fee (just exchange rate) every month (you set up an automatic deduction).

Fair warning: CA is the most paper-intensive bank I've ever seen, and even my French friends are stunned by the amount of paperwork given/required for even the simplest things. For instance, getting access to your acocunt online is done online, but then they send you a piece of paper with your initial password. In the mail. It's incredible. However, so far, the service has been quite good, despite this.

To your point Nadia - I am not sure about their requirements for residence, as I live in FR.

Thanks Steve."paper intensive" immediately means no-no for me so I'll avoid the CA. 

Someone suggests La banque postale, will look it up.

Under no circumstances do not use the CIC in Ferney, the staff is utterly useless. They are all nice in there,  but nothing gets done. Once they blocked my card because "it seemed I will go overdaft". And of course nobody even called or emailed me. I had to cancel many transactions on ebay and write a lot of embarassing explanations. I didnt even get a word of apology from the bank.

Does anyone have recommendations for:

a) a French bank who will open me a chf account with a ch iban (I believe this means I can receive payments without extra charges from Swiss clients)?

b) a Swiss bank who offer a low cost account to frontaliers?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Amy

Hi Amy

a) I'm pretty certain this is impossible. IBAN contains country-specific coding. You might be able to get an acount in FR denominated in CHF (since you can get CH accounts in other denominations). As for the extra charges: beyond account-to-account transfers on your own account I don't think there's any way to avoid the cross-border/Fx fees. That is how banks make their money after all!

b) What do you mean by 'low-cost account?' Certainly with interest rates everything is super low right now! ;-)

Best

Steve

One point for Credit Agricole - they have no problems with overdrafts. They'll charge an interest rate; but I've accidentally spent almost a whole month in the red (traveling) and it was no issue. I think I ended up paying like 13EUR for the privelege but that's much better than having my card blocked.

CIC will provide you a "shadow account" in CH. Anything transferred to that Swiss shadow account is automatically moved to your CHF account in FR. (Without any charges.)

I suppose other banks do the same.

I don't agree that CIC is useless, I have good experience with them. (Including warning me by email when I have an overdraft.)