The Total Cost of Owning a Bank Account

Ask what a bank account costs and the answer usually comes from the tariff sheet: a maintenance fee, a charge per transfer, perhaps a card. For a private client with serious assets, or a company the bank considers complex, the tariff sheet is rarely where the real price sits.

The real price is the condition attached to the account. Keep a minimum balance with us. Place part of your assets in our discretionary mandate. Leave a twelve-month deposit. None of these shows up as a fee, and each of them can cost far more than the fee does.

Why the bank prices it this way

A complex client is expensive to take on. Onboarding, source-of-wealth review, transaction monitoring and periodic reviews cost the bank real money, and a maintenance fee rarely covers them. The bank recovers that cost, and earns its margin, from what the client leaves behind: balances it can earn on, and products that carry their own fees.

That is not a scandal. It is how the account is financed. But it means the condition is part of the price, and it deserves the same scrutiny as the fee.

Three costs that are not on the tariff sheet

The idle balance. Since 16 September 2026 the European Central Bank has paid banks 2.50% a year on overnight deposits. A balance that earns nothing for the client can still earn for the bank. The client's cost is what the same money would have earned elsewhere at low risk - on €1,000,000, about €25,000 a year at today's ECB rate.

The tied product. An investment mandate or a house fund taken as a condition of the account is a purchase you did not shop for. In a 2023 comparison by the Swiss price-comparison service moneyland.ch, discretionary mandates at Swiss banks cost on average around 1.24% to 1.37% a year all-in, depending on the strategy. A broad global index fund can cost around 0.2%. If you would have invested anyway, the cost of the condition is the difference between the two, not the whole fee.

Fees inside the product count as well. Funds can pay distribution fees, known as retrocessions, back to the bank that placed them. Under Swiss case law, in a discretionary mandate those payments belong to the client unless the client has validly waived them, so it is worth reading what the mandate agreement says about them.

The lock-up. Money in a term deposit or a mandate cannot move the day you need it. That matters when a property purchase has a completion date, and it matters most when the bank decides to end the relationship, which it can do in a day while unwinding the products takes longer. We wrote about that asymmetry in The Bank Decides in a Day. Replacing It Takes Months.

An illustrative calculation

The numbers below are an example built on public rates, not a quote from any bank.

A private client is offered an account with a tariff of €1,500 a year. The conditions: keep €1,000,000 on a current account that pays no interest, and place another €1,000,000 in the bank's discretionary mandate.

• Tariff: €1,500
• €1,000,000 at 0% instead of the 2.50% ECB deposit rate: €25,000
• Mandate at about 1.3% all-in instead of an index fund at about 0.2%: €11,000

The account that costs €1,500 on paper costs about €37,500 a year - twenty-five times the visible fee. For a company the arithmetic is the same: a €500,000 minimum balance held at zero gives up around €12,500 a year at today's rate.

Payments have the same blind spot: the FX margin on a conversion is another number that never appears as a fee - we covered it in The Cost of a Cross-Border Payment Is Not the Fee.

What the rules say

The protection is narrower than most clients expect.

In the EU, the Payment Accounts Directive (Article 16(9)) says access to a basic payment account cannot be made conditional on buying additional services. It covers consumers and basic accounts. It does not cover companies, and it does not cover the premium and private banking accounts this article is about.

For investment products, MiFID II (Article 24(11)) requires a firm that offers an investment service as part of a package, or as a condition of the same agreement, to tell the client whether the components can be bought separately and to show the costs of each one. That is a right worth using.

In Switzerland, the duty to hand retrocessions to the client in a discretionary mandate comes from the Federal Supreme Court, unless there is a valid waiver. In 2026 the court confirmed that genuine execution-only relationships are different, because the conflict of interest the rule addresses is absent.

Questions to ask before you accept the condition

• What exactly is the condition - a balance, a deposit, a product - and is it written into the account agreement?
• What does the money held under the condition earn, and what would it earn at the ECB deposit rate?
• Can the components be bought separately, and what does each one cost on its own?
• What is the all-in annual cost of the product, including fees inside the funds and any retrocessions, and does the contract waive your right to them?
• How quickly can the money be released, and what happens to it if the bank ends the relationship?
• Add the lines up for one year and divide by the visible fee. That ratio is the real price of the account.

How we work

Our model sits on the other side of this arithmetic. We are paid on the transaction we complete, not on money we hold. We do not ask clients to keep a minimum balance with us, and we have no investment products to sell.

That changes the incentive. A business that earns on balances benefits from money staying put. A business that earns on completed transactions benefits from the money reaching the account the client chose. The documents the receiving bank may ask for are collected before the transfer, and when that bank has questions, our compliance team answers them.

The short version

The tariff sheet tells you what the bank charges. The conditions tell you what the account costs. Before accepting an account that comes with a balance, a deposit or a product attached, put a number on each of them. The fee is usually the smallest line.

Published for general information and education only. Not investment, financial, legal, or tax advice, and not an offer or solicitation in any jurisdiction. This is not marketing - Stablegate does not market its services to persons in the EU/EEA, the UK or the US (Restricted Persons).

The views expressed are current as of the publication date and may change. Third-party quotes are attributed and used under applicable quotation exceptions. Sourced and first-party data has not been independently verified and is provided without warranty. Any forward-looking statements are illustrative only. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

STGG AG is not a MiCA crypto-asset service provider (CASP) and does not offer or onboard services to Restricted Persons via this hub. Any service relationship arises only away from this hub, at the client's own exclusive initiative.