ETF Savings Plan Switzerland Guide: 0.39% fees, 0.06% product costs

ETF savings plans are now available in Switzerland from a whole range of providers — neobanks, online brokers and digital asset managers. What differs is no longer availability but design: who selects the fund? What does it really cost, including foreign exchange and stamp duty? Where is the fund domiciled? And what happens when the market falls twenty percent?

This guide answers exactly those questions. It covers how a savings plan works mechanically, why regular investing is psychologically superior and mathematically not always optimal, what fees really do over thirty years, and why fund domicile is a detail that costs you more than most fee debates ever address.

01What an ETF savings plan is — and isn't

An ETF savings plan is a standing order with an investment function. You set an amount and a rhythm, and that amount is automatically invested in an exchange-traded index fund. No login, no purchase decision, no "the market looks expensive today." The arvy ETF Savings Plan executes weekly — not because that transforms returns (more on this shortly), but because shorter intervals smooth entry prices and leave your money sitting in cash for less time.

What a savings plan is not: a guarantee, a savings account, or a risk-free product. Values fluctuate. In a bad year your portfolio will show less than you paid in — and that's the normal case, not the exception. Historically, global equity markets have closed roughly one calendar year in four in negative territory. If you can't accept that, don't start a savings plan. Build your emergency reserve first.

02Dollar-cost averaging: the mechanics behind the autopilot

Dollar-cost averaging describes something simple. If you always invest the same amount, you automatically buy more units when prices are low and fewer when they're high. Your average price ends up below the average of the prices you paid.

An example over four weeks at CHF 100 per week. The price starts at 100, falls to 80, then to 50, then recovers to 80. You buy 1.00, 1.25, 2.00 and 1.25 units — 5.5 units in total for CHF 400. Your average price: CHF 72.70. The average of the four prices: CHF 77.50. You didn't earn that difference through skill. You earned it through consistency.

Why weekly?

The honest answer: mathematically, it barely matters. Invest CHF 500 a month for 30 years at 6.55% net of fees and you end up with roughly CHF 558,000. Spread the same amount across weekly purchases and it's roughly CHF 561,000 — a difference of about CHF 2,700, less than half a percent of the final value.

The case for weekly is still a good one: your money is invested sooner on average rather than waiting in cash, entry prices are more thoroughly smoothed, and in volatile phases you capture more price levels. We're not promising you extra return. We're telling you it's cleaner.

03Lump sum or savings plan? The honest answer

This is the most frequently asked question — and the one where most providers get evasive. The evidence is clear: if you have a larger amount available today, investing it immediately beats staggering it in roughly two cases out of three. The reason is mundane. Equity markets rise more often than they fall. Staggering means holding cash longer on average — and cash earns less than the market.

So why do we still recommend a savings plan? Because for most people, "lump sum or savings plan" is the wrong question. You don't have a million francs sitting in an account waiting to be deployed. You have an income. And for an income there is no alternative to a savings plan — every month brings new money that wants to be invested.

That third layer is the difference between a savings plan and an investment strategy. A standing order keeps investing regardless. An investor who understands what's happening increases during a correction. That requires no market timing and no forecast — only the willingness to buy more at minus 20% rather than sell.

04Time in the market beats timing the market

The largest single-day gains in market history sit almost immediately next to the largest single-day losses. That's not a curiosity — it's a property of panic: when volatility explodes, it explodes in both directions. Step out after a bad day to "watch the situation" and you'll very likely miss the recovery, then buy back in at higher prices.

The cost of that behaviour is measurable. Vanguard puts the value of disciplined behaviour at around 1.5% a year, and up to 2 in stressed markets. Morningstar's Gamma study arrives at 1.59%. Dalbar has measured a gap of 1.5% to 3% between fund returns and investor returns over decades. Different methods, one finding: the most expensive component of a portfolio is the person who owns it.

05Why ETFs are so efficient

An ETF tracks an index instead of trying to beat it. No analyst team, no research budget, no trading activity beyond the adjustments the index requires. The result is a total expense ratio measured in a few hundredths of a percent for broad world indices — 0.06% in the arvy ETF Savings Plan.

Three further properties matter especially in a savings-plan context. Diversification — two instruments give you ownership in several thousand companies across 23 developed and 24 emerging markets. Transparency — you can look up exactly what's inside at any time. And divisibility — savings plans only work if CHF 87.50 can be invested without anyone rounding to whole units.

The point almost everyone misses: dividends

Over long horizons, a substantial share of equity returns comes not from price appreciation but from reinvested dividends. Data from J.P. Morgan and FactSet on the MSCI World from 1970 to 2025 shows a gap of roughly 2.4% a year between the index with and without dividend reinvestment.

What that means in practice: at CHF 500 a month over 30 years, roughly CHF 610,000 (at 7%, dividends reinvested) versus roughly CHF 387,000 (at 4.6%, without). Over 220,000 francs of difference — purely because distributions are automatically reinvested instead of quietly draining into a current account. In the arvy ETF Savings Plan this happens automatically, with nothing required from you.

060.45% all-in — and why every tenth matters

Fees are the only component of your return you know in advance. You can't control market returns. You can control costs. Which is why the number that matters isn't the management fee and isn't the TER, but the sum of both. For the world equity portfolio that is a 0.39% management fee plus 0.06% TER, 0.45% per year.

A comparison on CHF 10,000 invested. All figures are all-in annual costs — management plus product costs. Competitors are anonymised.

Provider	Management	TER	All-in	CHF / year
arvy	0.39%	0.06%	0.45%	CHF 45.00
V	0.25%	0.24%	0.49%	CHF 49.00
F ¹	0.39%	0.10%	0.49%	CHF 49.00
F ²	0.40%	0.20%	0.60%	CHF 60.00
T	0.50%	0.17%	0.67%	CHF 67.00
S	0.68%	0.22%	0.90%	CHF 90.00
I	1.20%	–	1.20%	CHF 120.00

Provider names shortened to their initial; two providers sharing an initial are distinguished by ¹ and ². Stamp duties and foreign exchange costs are transaction-dependent and not included here; the arvy ETF Savings Plan charges no FX surcharge.

0.04% against the next-cheapest provider looks trivial. Over thirty years it isn't quite — and against the most expensive provider it becomes a serious number. Here is the final value at CHF 500 a month over 30 years at a 7% gross return, after deducting each all-in cost:

Between 0.45% and 1.20% lies roughly CHF 75,000 — same market, same contributions. That isn't a difference in returns. It's the same market, billed differently. The long-form treatment of this topic is in The True Cost of Investing.

07Irish domicile: the quiet return advantage

Here is the number that appears in almost no fee comparison and can nonetheless exceed the fee difference itself.

When a fund receives dividends from US companies, the US withholds tax at source. How much depends on where the fund is domiciled. A fund based in Ireland benefits from the Ireland–US double taxation treaty and pays 15% on US dividends instead of the standard 30%. Those 15% don't flow back to you — they simply stay in the fund's assets rather than going to the US treasury.

Because US equities now make up by far the largest share of any world index, this is not a detail. Depending on dividend yield and US weighting, the effect sits in the order of 0.15% to 0.19% a year — roughly the entire fee difference between a cheap and a very cheap provider.

The withholding tax effect is an estimate. It depends on the index's US weighting, the prevailing dividend yield and the specific fund structure, and moves with all three.

08Swiss taxes: what you need to know

The good news first: for private investors in Switzerland, capital gains are tax-free. If your savings plan appreciates over twenty years, you pay no income tax on that appreciation. It's a structural advantage over almost every neighbouring country and one reason long-term equity saving is unusually attractive here.

What is taxable is manageable. Wealth tax: your portfolio value on 31 December counts toward taxable wealth — cantonally variable, in practice usually a fraction of a percent. Income tax on distributions: dividends and interest received by the fund are taxable income — including when they are accumulated, meaning automatically reinvested. The Federal Tax Administration publishes the relevant per-fund figures in its ICTax system.

This is not tax advice. Cantonal differences are significant, and for larger portfolios or unusual situations a professional is worth the money.

09How much should you invest each month?

The answer depends on your income, not on a rule of thumb. But the orders of magnitude help — three scenarios below, calculated at a 7% annual return, roughly the long-run expectation for broad equity markets.

The interesting line isn't the final value — it's the ratio. At CHF 500 a month you contribute CHF 180,000 over thirty years, and roughly CHF 430,000 of the final value comes from compounding. Two thirds of the result wasn't saved. It was waited for.

Which is why the critical variable isn't the amount but the time. Someone investing CHF 200 a month from age thirty ends up ahead at sixty of someone starting at CHF 500 a month at forty-five. If you want to see how a long horizon plays out in a specific goal, our FIRE calculator runs the same maths against a target.

10What you own — and why

The arvy ETF Savings Plan starts deliberately simple: one broad world index. Specifically a world equity portfolio built from two blocks: roughly 88% developed markets and roughly 12% emerging markets, both weighted by market capitalisation. Which funds we use for that is set out with ISIN, costs and domicile on The Building Blocks. It is a very efficient way to participate in global corporate returns, and it requires zero decisions from you.

Market covered	developed and emerging markets
Split	roughly 88% / roughly 12%
Replication	physical
Income treatment	accumulating
Bought in	Swiss francs on SIX
Product costs	0.06%

That simplicity is a design decision, not a limitation. Most savings plans fail not from a lack of choice but from too much of it: faced with eighty ETFs, people often choose none — or choose whichever performed best last year.

What this index also gets criticised for

So that you read it here rather than elsewhere: a market-cap-weighted world index has three well-known weaknesses. First, the US share sits at roughly 70%. Second, the ten largest positions together account for about a quarter of fund assets — diversification by count is not the same as diversification by risk. Third, a developed-markets index contains no emerging markets and no small caps — which is why we add a second block at roughly 12% emerging markets.

We consider that acceptable, for reasons worth stating. The high US share is exactly why the Irish fund domicile is worth so much — the withholding tax saving bites hardest there. Emerging markets are covered by a second block, so the portfolio has the same coverage as an index spanning the entire world. And if you want to actively reduce the concentration in the largest companies, the options are in Core-Satellite Strategy Explained.

If you don't want 100% equities

The world equity portfolio is the standard version and the one this guide is about. Alongside it sit two mixed profiles combining the world index with a Swiss franc bond fund.

Profile	Equities / bonds	All-in
Growth	100 / 0	0.45%
Balanced	60 / 40	0.46%
Defensive	30 / 70	0.47%

Possible further building blocks

Further building blocks are conceivable once the base is running — we will build them if the community wants them, not on spec. A Swiss allocation for those who want part of their wealth in the currency they pay their bills in — a deliberate, measured home bias rather than an accidental one. A dividend strategy for those in the drawdown phase who want distributions rather than growth.

What arrives is decided by demand, not by a roadmap. The core remains the world index in any case — set nothing and you get the simplest and cheapest version.

11When markets fall: what happens next

Every savings plan works in a bull market. The difference shows up in the month your portfolio is 20% underwater and your gut is telling you that this time is different.

Most providers send you nothing at that moment — or a push notification with a red number. We do it differently, and that is the actual reason we built this savings plan.

Alongside that comes arvy Weekly, read by over 12,000 subscribers, and our founders' column in The Market by NZZ. This is the part a pure execution service cannot deliver: context. People who understand why a market is falling sell into the bottom far less often. How investors came through earlier crises is covered in Investing in Turbulent Times.

12Core and satellite: savings plan plus arvy compounders

The ETF Savings Plan isn't our only offering, and the two complement each other better than it might first appear.

The ETF Savings Plan delivers the market: broad, cheap, entirely rules-based, with a historical expectation in the 7 to 10% a year range. The arvy fund is a concentrated global equity portfolio of quality businesses — compounders, as we call them — targeting over 10% and deliberately composed differently from the index. Less dependence on a handful of large US technology names, more concentration in business models that compound capital over decades.

Which one is your core depends on you — and both directions are defensible. If you want maximum breadth and minimum cost as your foundation, the ETF Savings Plan is the core and the arvy fund the satellite. If you want to reduce the concentration risks embedded in a market-cap-weighted index, you can hold the arvy fund as the core and layer the world index on top as broad diversification. Either way it's a combination of market return and active selection — only the weighting differs.

13How to start

Open an account, set an amount, set up a standing order — the rest runs automatically. No account transfer, no order screen, no decision about which ETF is currently the right one.

Three things to take with you before you start. First: pick an amount you can sustain in a bad year too. A savings plan that gets paused at the first correction has missed its purpose. Second: schedule the standing order for the day after your salary lands. What leaves first doesn't get spent. Third: don't check the portfolio daily. Returns accumulate over decades; anxiety accumulates over days.

14Frequently asked questions

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