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A full review of DEGIRO for Swiss residents: exactly what a trade costs on the Swiss exchange and on ETFs, the charges most reviews leave out, how the account opening actually goes, and who it is and is not for. Every fee below was read off DEGIRO’s own Swiss fee page on 8 August 2026.
A cheap and simple way for a Swiss resident to buy ETFs and shares, provided you’re happy choosing and placing the trades yourself. There’s no Swiss regulation, no advice and no demo account, and the headline “free ETFs” aren’t quite free. On cost it now sits behind Interactive Brokers, which is cheaper on most trades and charges no custody fee either.
In this post I’m going to be reviewing DEGIRO, a relatively new Dutch based broker established in 2013 who serve a global client base – including those living in Switzerland.
The DEGIRO mission? To develop ‘affordable custom-made financial services for investors worldwide’.
Sounds interesting – and judging by the marketing they are certainly delivering on the promise of being ‘affordable’ by offering a huge list of very low cost ETFs you can trade directly in the platform.
The target audience for this DEGIRO review are generally for those who have some experience and willing to get their hands dirty with ‘DIY investing’ to build a portfolio and buy ETFs manually.
If the above just made you freak out, check out our investing basics and robo advisor reviews (e.g. Selma Finance) for a more ‘hands off’ approach and to get a better understanding before trying Degiro.
As always, I’ll be documenting the account opening process from end to end in this DEGIRO review through a simple format to show you all the pros and cons of the platform. I’ll be taking you through it so you follow along, step by step.
Make sure you read to the end so you can make the best decision if DEGIRO is right for you.
DEGIRO Review: Pros and Cons
Before we dive into the full DEGIRO review, I want to quickly show you the main pros and cons.
In short – for Swiss residents DEGIRO is a great option to start investing. With rock bottom prices you can start investing extremely cheaply, and there are no custody fees at all, whatever the balance.
Account opening is painless, support prompt and the mobile & tablet apps are a nice edition to the offering.
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Four things to know before you open one
- You are the one making the decisions. DEGIRO sells access, not advice. If you want a portfolio built for you, a robo-advisor is the right shape and this review is not.
- It is not Swiss regulated. The entity is German and supervised by BaFin. That is not the same as unsafe, but it is different from a Swiss bank and worth understanding before you fund it.
- There is no pillar 3a here. DEGIRO is a broker for taxable investing only. Your 3a needs a separate home, compared on cost in the pillar 3a comparison.
- Trade size matters more than the headline fee. A CHF 6 charge on a CHF 200 purchase is 3%. On CHF 2,000 it is 0.3%. The fixed fee is what makes small, frequent trades expensive.
How to open an account with DEGIRO
Head over to the homepage at degiro.ch to get started.
The generic stock imagery design and branding looks a little bland, but the social evidence of winning over 100 awards and having more than 2.5M clients is comforting and gives confidence.
Click ‘Open an account’ top right:
Enter your email, pick a username and password on the next screen, and click ‘Open an account’:
Almost instantly, you’ll be passed onto the next screen and be asked to check your email:
Switch to your inbox, and you should find an email from DEGIRO to confirm:
Note – This email was flagged as spam for me, so check your spam folder if you don’t see anything in 2-3minutes.
Once you click the link in your email to verify, you’ll be able to login:
Enter your username and password and click ‘login’:
The next screen does nothing and DEGIRO should remove it. Click ‘Continue’:
Enter your full name as it appears on your passport (or ID card) and hit ‘Continue’:
Next you’ll need to enter your mobile number and click ‘Submit’:
Enter your home address next, and click ‘Continue’..
Date and country of birth as on your passport, standard stuff here. Continue.
US person? Make it known here and click ‘Continue’:
Enter the IBAN of your bank account which you’ll use to transfer funds to your future DEGIRO account, then click ‘Continue’:
Double check the details you’ve just entered. No typos? Good. Continue.
More verification steps, pretty standard stuff here:
Now you’ll need to upload a scan of your passport, so have the PDF/JPG ready before-hand if you aren’t using a smartphone:
Despite the image below, the form didn’t actually accept my AHV number. So I clicked ‘I don’t have this number’ and hit Submit, which still worked fine:
Ok – now we need to wait for the verification. Maybe it’ll take up to 2 days..
Infact…the verified email came 5minues later. Kapow!
Ok now you can enter your AHV number and hit ‘Submit’:
Tick ‘I promise to pay my taxes’ and hit ‘Submit’
Next you can select the type of DEGIRO account you’d like to have. In this example I’ve selected the Basic Profile as it’s the cheapest option.
Brace yourself for the longest T&C’s on earth – the ‘Acceptance Form Investment Services’..
And finally:
Once you’ve signed your life away, you’ll get an SMS out of the blue. Enter the code here:
You can download the PDF agreements for your records before hitting ‘Continue’:
Ok! You’ve completed the first stage of account creation and can now move onto funding the account.
Another useless screen with no purpose. Click ‘Continue’:
Deja Vu alert. Get your IBAN out again and enter it again here:
There are two options here to fund your account, Sofort or bank transfer.
I’d never heard of Sofort, but they claim to fund the account in minutes, but you have to enter you online banking details (as in, your actual bank pin and password) through the Sofort payment gateway. Plus they take a small cut.
I’m sure it’s legit, but I wasn’t comfortable with doing that.
So instead for this DEGIRO review, I selected a regular ol’ bank transfer:
Note the DEGIRO IBAN number below to transfer your first deposit.
They advise against using providers such as Transferwise & Revolut, and as you are transferring from your CHF bank to DEGIRO’s in Basel, there isn’t any real need anyway.
Once done in your online banking, you’ll need to wait 2-3 days for the transfer to arrive and be assigned to your account.
3 days later, you’ll receive a welcome email from DEGIRO, and you can then continue the process.
Which means completing an Appropriateness test, hit ‘Continue’:
Don’t worry, this isn’t anything too tricky. Hit ‘Continue’:
Click your education level (don’t just copy mine!) and you’ll be passed onto the next screen:
Next, select your level of experience with trading in general. This will be unique to you, so pick one of the three:
Same here, indicate how well you understand the risks:
And we keep going through the list of stuff you can trade on DEGIRO:
Same option for shares this time…
… and then Bitcoin bonds…
… And finally Structured Products:
Final disclaimer to confirm you are aware you could lose all your money::
OK done. Click ‘Continue’:
Very close now to seeing the trading platform.
Complete the W-8BEN info – final steps. The W8-Ben enables you to avoid double taxation and the reduces the withholding tax on any US listed products you buy.
Read through the certification and hit ‘Submit’:
Click ‘To trader’ and you’ll be redirected to your new live account:
Or in the words of Prince Harry:
Logging in for the first time
After completing the above, you’ll be passed automatically into the trading platform.
You’ll be presented with a short ‘tour’ which guides you through some of the interface highlights. Click ‘Start Tour’ to, er, start the tour:
Top right you can add and remove funds into your account:
Next you are shown how to search for various products and asset classes.
Hit ‘Next’ to cycle through these screens:
A ‘quick order’ section to streamline the process of buying & selling common products:
See what’s happening with your pending orders and past transactions under the Activity section in the left navigation bar:
And finally your Account Overview is shown at the top of trading window.
Hit ‘Dismiss’ to complete the tour and return to the platform dashboard.
The trading platform
Having worked through the above intro you’ll be back onto your account dashboard.
To give you a better feel for the platform, lets buy an example ETF index tracker fund.
To do that, I click in the search box top left, and enter (for example) Vanguard S&P500:
I’ll select the EUR version from the list, which loads the next detailed screen on the fund.
Why the EUR version I hear you ask? With DEGIRO these are free to trade (conditions apply) and carry only the EUR 1 handling fee. You can see the full list below in the ‘Fees & Charges’ section.
This means for a spend of 50 CHF, that is the difference between roughly EUR 3 and EUR 1, so the saving is real but small in francs
You can click through the document section if you wish to download related fund PDF documents.
For now, I’ll click the green ‘Buy’ over on the right hand side:
The right sidebar will then pop out to place an order, which enables you to specify how much you want to buy when the market opens.
To keep things simple in this example, I’ve used the default settings of ‘Limit Order’ to execute the trade at a defined maximum share price.
I’ve entered I want to buy 1 share, and the price (50.8366 CHF) is reflected in CHF on the right:
‘Day Order’ is also the default, and means the order is valid for an entire day until the market closes.
Once happy with the details I click ‘Place Order’ and move onto the next step.
Now you can review your order details (open up the “margin impact” tab also) before giving a final confirmation:
You’ll then get the little notifcation displayed:
If you’ve placed the trade outside of trading hours, you’ll need to click ‘View order’ and you can then see it on your order dashboard.
If the markets are open, the transaction will execute almost instantly and be visible in your Portfolio:
You now own a small piece of the top 500 companies in the US, for a EUR 1 handling fee and no commission.
Funding the DEGIRO account
Simply click the ‘Deposit / withdraw’ button in the top right of the platform to then select either an instant transfer with Sofort or a regular ol’ bank transfer.
Clicking bank transfer gives you the IBAN details to send the money via your online banking platform. Be sure to send from the same IBAN you used when you setup your account in order for DEGIRO to match the recieved funds to you.
DEGIRO show you the beneficiary name, IBAN and reference to use inside the platform when you choose bank transfer. Use the details shown in your own account rather than any published elsewhere, including here: the receiving entity changed after the flatex merger and these things move.
Login & Security
SSL encryption and https are used on the trading platfom, and you have the option to enable two factor authentication under your profile page.
Then just click ‘Security’ to enable it:
DEGIRO offers brokerage services and merged with flatex in 2020 and now trades as flatexDEGIRO Bank AG. While they are not regulated by Swiss authorities and regulators such as FINMA, they do however fall under regulation of Germany and the Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht (BaFin).
However, despite not having a Swiss office or being regulated here, they are reputable and you can easily open an account with them to test things out.
Fees & Charges
Being ‘Low cost’ is a unique selling point for DEGIRO, and they certainly deliver.
| What you are buying | Commission | Handling | Total per trade |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swiss shares and ETFs on SIX | CHF 5 | CHF 1 | CHF 6 |
| ETFs in the Core Selection | EUR 0 | EUR 1 | EUR 1 |
| Other ETFs | EUR 2 | EUR 1 | EUR 3 |
| US shares | EUR 1 | EUR 1 | EUR 2 |
| Custody, inactivity, deposits, withdrawals | EUR 0 | EUR 0 | EUR 0 |
Two charges that are easy to miss. Currency conversion runs at 0.25% through AutoFX, which applies every time you buy something not priced in francs, and manual conversion costs EUR 10 plus 0.25%. Separately there is a connectivity fee of up to 0.25% of your portfolio, capped at EUR 2.50 a year per exchange, charged only on exchanges you actually use. Your home exchange, SIX, is free.
What a realistic year costs
Say you buy one Core Selection ETF a month and nothing else. That is 12 trades at EUR 1, so EUR 12 a year in handling, plus 0.25% currency conversion on each purchase because the ETF is priced in euros, plus nothing at all for custody.
Buying a Swiss share on SIX instead costs CHF 6 a trade, which is where the DIY approach stops being obviously cheapest for small, frequent purchases. Size your trades so the fixed fee is a small share of the amount.
Their ETF Core Selection carries no commission, and that is the headline you see everywhere. It is not the same as free: a EUR 1 handling fee still applies to every one of those trades, and the selection sits under a Fair Use Policy, so an extra EUR 2 commission can apply if you trade it very actively. The list covers the big names, Vanguard and iShares among them, and it changes from time to time.
> See the full list of low cost ETFs in PDF format.
For individual share purchases, DEGIRO is in a different league from a high street bank, though not from Interactive Brokers, which starts at USD 0.35 on US markets against DEGIRO’s EUR 2. Here’s a breakdown:
There are no inactivity fees, no annual fees, no deposit or withdrawal fees and no custody fees, at any balance.
Customer Support
Customer support with DEGIRO is excellent. Fast, responsive and on point. The call center is open until 10pm, and email responses are pretty fast when we tested. Top marks for this Degiro review.
There is also an extensive Help Center, a huge database of common FAQ and support questions you can browse through. All available in English, German, French and Italian – which is pretty impressive and something we don’t see much with the competition.
Additional Resources
In terms of additional resources and educational material, there isn’t too much with DEGIRO.
No blog, no webinars, no educational content – which is a shame and I feel is a missed opportunity.
With such a good product and service, they could really ramp up their marketing efforts through some content marketing and thought leadership pieces – and at least got the basics of a blog in place to cover topics of interest.
DEGIRO vs Interactive Brokers
Both are cheap, and Interactive Brokers is the cheaper of the two on most trades: CHF 5.00 against CHF 6.00 on a CHF 10,000 order on SIX, and USD 0.35 against EUR 2 on US shares. DEGIRO holds its own on the Core Selection ETFs and is far easier to learn. The full detail is in my Interactive Brokers review.
Feature by feature:
The same comparison as a table, built from source-verified data. Pick another provider to check any pairing yourself.
DEGIRO comparison
| DEGIRO | Interactive Brokers | |
|---|---|---|
| Swiss trade (CHF 2’000 on SIX) | CHF 6 (CHF 5 + CHF 1 handling) | CHF 1.50 (Tiered: 0.05%, min CHF 1.50); Fixed CHF 5 |
| US trade (USD 2’000) | EUR 2 + currency exchange | USD 0.35 (Tiered); Fixed USD 1 |
| Custody and account fees | None; foreign exchanges up to EUR 2.50 a year each (SIX free) | None; no inactivity fee, no minimum |
| Currency exchange | 0.25% (AutoFX) | 0.002%, min USD 2 |
| Swiss stamp duty charged | No | No |
| Savings plan | No savings plan | Recurring investments with fractional shares |
| Who holds your account | flatexDEGIRO Bank SE, BaFin (Germany) | Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Ltd, FCA |
| Notes | Most fees are billed in euros, even on the Swiss site. | Very low trading costs; the account sits with the UK entity, not a Swiss bank. |
| My rating | ★ 4.0 | ★ 4.8 |
| Full review | – | Read the full Interactive Brokers review → |
Checked at source: DEGIRO 23 September 2026 · Interactive Brokers 23 September 2026
Background info on DEGIRO
After the founding in 2013, Degiro opened to the Swiss market in 2016. Since then the company continues to grow at quite a pace – serving more than 2.5 million clients across 18 markets.
They have received various awards across the globe, including those related to being the cheapest broker in various markets.
They are headquartered in Amsterdam – Amstelplein 1, 1096 HA, and do not have an office in Switzerland.
Closing thoughts
Because DEGIRO have such a simple onboarding process and user-friendly trading platform, they are really a great option for DIY investors. If you know what you want to buy, they are extremely cheap and effective way to start online trading in Switzerland.
But if you are looking for someone to do all the work for you, I recommend going with a robo-advisor such as Selma Finance. As you saw in this DEGIRO review, is very ‘hands on’ with buying stocks and shares, which for some might be too confusing when starting out investing in Switzerland.
Either way, despite not having a demo account, you can open an DEGIRO account with just 1 CHF to test out the service and decide which is right for you.
Thanks for reading and I hope this DEGIRO review was useful!
DEGIRO has no demo account, which is a genuine drawback. What it does have is no minimum deposit, so opening an account and funding it with a small amount is the only way to see the platform properly, and it costs you nothing to hold.
DEGIRO FAQ
What does a trade actually cost on DEGIRO?
A Swiss share or ETF on SIX costs CHF 5 commission plus CHF 1 handling, so CHF 6. An ETF in the Core Selection costs EUR 1, being no commission plus the EUR 1 handling fee. Other ETFs cost EUR 3 and US shares EUR 2. There are no custody, inactivity, deposit or withdrawal fees.
Are DEGIRO ETFs really free?
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. The Core Selection carries no commission, but the EUR 1 handling fee still applies to every trade, and the selection falls under a Fair Use Policy that can add EUR 2 if you trade it very actively.
Is there a DEGIRO demo account?
No. There is no practice mode, so the only way to look around the platform is to open a live account. There is no minimum deposit, so you can do that without committing much.
Is DEGIRO regulated in Switzerland?
No. DEGIRO merged with flatex in 2020 and the banking entity is flatexDEGIRO Bank AG, supervised by BaFin in Germany. It is not a Swiss bank and not supervised by FINMA. Check the current investor protection scheme and its limits on DEGIRO’s own site rather than relying on a figure quoted elsewhere.
Does DEGIRO offer a pillar 3a?
No. DEGIRO is a broker for taxable investing only. If you want a 3a, every Swiss provider is compared on total cost in my pillar 3a comparison.
What is the minimum to open a DEGIRO account?
There is no minimum deposit. You can fund with a token amount to look around, though you obviously cannot buy much with it.
What is the connectivity fee?
A charge for access to exchanges outside your home market, capped at EUR 2.50 a year per exchange and only applied if you trade or hold a position there. Your home exchange, SIX, is free.
Is DEGIRO better than a robo-advisor?
Different jobs. DEGIRO is cheaper if you are happy choosing and placing trades yourself. A robo-advisor builds and rebalances the portfolio for you and costs more for that. If you are not sure which you are, you probably want the robo-advisor.
Compare & choose
The other comparisons on Investing Hero, each built the same way: every fee read from the provider’s own pricing page.
How this review is kept current. Every DEGIRO fee on this page was read from DEGIRO’s own Swiss fee page on 8 August 2026, not from a comparison site. The account-opening screenshots are kept deliberately: the flow has not materially changed and they are the most useful part of the page. Educational content, not financial advice.
Cool Article! I am using Degrio and love the product.
Yep, I have been using Degiro for 5 years already. No major issues, low cost, platform is Okay for me. As you say, it is super cool for DIY people!
Good to hear!