What the Swissquote card actually costs, and where it falls down

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

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18+ Only

If you have hit a wall with an ordinary bank card — a declined application, a closed account, a nationality that makes opening one awkward — then a card issued by a regulated Swiss or Luxembourg bank rather than by a crypto startup is a genuinely different proposition. That is the whole appeal of Swissquote: it is not a crypto company pretending to be a bank. It is a bank that added a card you can pay with from a crypto balance.

I came to this review expecting to find a catch, and there is one, but it is not where I thought. The catch is not fees or safety. The catch is geography: what you get, what it costs and even whether it reaches you at all depends on which region the site shows you. And in August 2026 the company told around 600 customers their accounts could close. So read this with both halves in view.

The conditions described below are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 7.1 out of 10

The score is not a rounding of “good enough.” Swissquote scores well on cost, on everyday use and on the reliability of the institution behind it, and badly on one thing that matters more than the others for the reader this page is written for: top-ups. If your money is already inside a Swissquote account, this card is a good deal and the Elite tier is genuinely interesting. If you are trying to fund it from an outside wallet you already hold — a self-custody setup, say, or a stablecoin sitting on a chain — the card does not tell you that this is possible. That silence is the reason the top-up score is as low as it is.

The audience note I would weave in is this: Swiss-bank clients who want a debit card with crypto payments on it. That is the natural user, and the card is built for them. The monthly fee, the ATM allowance and the conversion rate all assume someone who keeps a balance and spends steadily.

Will they give you the card

First, the thing that decides everything: you need a Swissquote account in your own name. The card is not an independent product you can apply for on its own — it is a feature of an account you must already hold or open.

Second, and this is where people get stuck, the product and the pricing depend on which region the site decides you are in. The site selector offers Switzerland, Europe, the UK, the Middle East, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong and Rest of World. So the CHF 6.90 monthly fee on Bright is a Swiss number first of all, and the Elite tier’s asset requirement is stated in CHF. Read the terms for your own region before you read anything I have written about price.

Third, if you want physical Bright or Elite cards, the starting data lists 15 countries: Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, Austria, France, Germany, the UK, Cyprus, Spain, Malta, Monaco, the UAE, South Africa and Greece. Belgium appears on the list too, making the count as listed. Virtual Light cards are not restricted the same way, since they are issued to account holders.

Unofficial, and not confirmed by the card’s own pages: a third-party site reported on 11 August 2026 that 35 countries are available and 13 are restricted, among them the US, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. Treat that as a starting point for your own enquiry, not as a rule.

The item I would not leave out: news on 17 August 2026 reported that Swissquote warned about 600 customers, mostly users of its Yuh app, that accounts could be closed. The customers described were residents with specific citizenships, some with permanent residence. CEO Mark Burky said the reasons are exclusively economic in nature. At the time of the report the accounts had not been closed, and no extension was planned beyond the roughly 600 identified. If your reason for wanting an easy account is that ordinary banks have been difficult, this is exactly the failure mode you were trying to escape, and it happens here too.

On identity checks: the card pages do not say which documents you need, what proof of address is required, or what the minimum age is. That is not stated on the pages I read. Full banking KYC and AML applies — that much is clear from the nature of the institution — and for EU-type customer due diligence you can expect the usual set: identity documents, a sanctions check, an understanding of the purpose of the relationship, and a politically-exposed-person determination. If due diligence cannot be completed, the institution is required to stop rather than proceed, which is why documents matter. Elite additionally requires at least CHF 100,000 in total assets at subscription.

How to get it

The route is short and it is not the hard part.

1. Open a Swissquote account. The app offers a simplified opening for some applicants.
2. Make a first deposit — this is required, not optional, before the card can be ordered.
3. Order the card from the app’s Bank tab, or from the desktop platform.

Elite is the exception to the easy path: it needs at least CHF 100,000 of total assets at the time of subscription.

What the card is once it arrives: a Mastercard debit. Light is virtual only. Bright is physical plus virtual. Elite is metal, physical plus virtual. It draws on multi-currency accounts, and 13 currencies count as main: CHF, USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD, SEK, HKD, NOK, DKK, AED and SGD.

Delivery time and delivery cost are not stated on the official pages. A virtual card is active immediately after you order it, which is the fastest way to find out whether the account works at all. Unofficial, from a third-party review of 6 March 2025 and from the same August 2026 site: a physical card arrives by post within 3 to 4 working days, with one source putting it at 3 to 4 days after approval.

Replacement cards cost CHF 5 on Bright and CHF 50 on Elite. The Light replacement fee is not stated.

How long verification takes, and on what grounds an application is refused: not stated on the card pages. If you are in a hurry, plan around the fact that nobody has published an answer.

Fees: what it really costs

Here is the whole price list, so you can check my arithmetic against your own spending.

A few details worth knowing before you read the table. Cancelling is free on Light and Bright. On Elite it is free after six months; before that it costs two monthly fees. The CHF 6.90 on Bright is not charged from month one — it starts in the seventh.

The crypto conversion fee is not stated on the pricing page. Unofficial, a 1% charge to exchange crypto for a card payment, from a third-party review of 6 March 2025, with the same site quoting tiered rates of 1% between EUR 25 and 10,000, 0.75% between 10,000 and 50,000, and 0.5% above 50,000. I have not applied those tiers to any figure of my own, because the current page does not confirm them.

Now three everyday payments, so the table becomes something you can actually picture.

A coffee in Zurich on a Monday. You tap for a coffee. The card carries no transaction fee. But this is a Swiss franc purchase in a Swiss franc account, so no conversion is triggered and you pay exactly the coffee’s price. The 0.95% only bites when the currency of the payment and the currency of the account differ.

A subscription billed in euros from a Bright card with a euro balance. Transaction fee free. The account holds EUR, the merchant charges EUR, so no conversion, no fee. This is the case that rewards multi-currency accounts: keep the currency you spend in.

The same subscription billed in dollars from a Bright card with no dollar balance. Now you are converting. At 0.95% on the 13 main currencies, a USD 60 subscription costs about USD 0.57 in conversion, before anything else. On Elite, anything up to CHF 5,000 a month converts free, and past that it is 0.25% per transaction.

One structural point on cash, because it is where the tiers actually differ. Light costs CHF 1.90 in Switzerland and CHF 4.90 abroad, per withdrawal. Bright is free five times a month in Switzerland, then CHF 4.90. Elite gives you five free withdrawals a month both in Switzerland and abroad — that is the part of Elite’s pricing that is plainly about travel, and if you withdraw cash abroad regularly it is the reason to consider the CHF 39.

How to top it up

Top up, and this is the section where you should slow down.

You select crypto as the card’s payment method inside the app, and only the tokens needed for that particular purchase are sold. Supported: Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP, with the company saying more are planned. Limits may apply when the funding comes from crypto exchanges.

The funding itself comes out of your Swissquote account — the bank and trading balance — not from an external wallet. That is the design, and it is why the top-up score sits at 4 out of 10 in my table above. The card’s public pages do not name external wallets and do not name stablecoins. If your plan was to move a stablecoin from your own wallet onto the card, nothing on these pages tells you that this is possible, and I will not guess on your behalf. Ask Client Services before you rely on it.

Debit card spends draw from the Swissquote account too, and a first deposit is required. The deposit fee and the deposit minimum are not stated on the card pages.

Withdrawing cash works through ATMs, priced in the table above. Trading Credit is not cash. What happens to a balance if you close the account, and how quickly crypto and bank balances can be withdrawn, is not stated on the pages I read. The balance sits in a Swissquote bank account, so transfers follow the account terms rather than anything on the card page — read those terms, they are the binding document.

Paying with it every day

This is the card’s strongest suit, and the score of 9 out of 10 reflects that.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported. A pricing comparison also lists Samsung Pay, and the Swiss page carries TWINT and eBill — so if you are in Switzerland, your native payment rails are in scope. Blocked merchant categories are not stated, which is a small worry for anyone who spends on travel or adult content.

Rewards are paid as Trading Credit, at a rate on both regular and crypto payments. On crypto payments the official pricing page gives Light 0.5% and Bright and Elite 1%. Unofficial, from the same third-party site: regular purchases return Light 0.25% and Bright and Elite 0.5%, and Elite adds 0.5% in gold capped at CHF 25 a month, which needs roughly CHF 5,000 of spending. The same source says Trading Credit is not withdrawable and expires after three months. Note what Trading Credit means: it is not cash and it is not a stable balance, so treat it as a nudge rather than a return.

The app itself is the Swissquote mobile app, on iOS and Android, with the Bank tab where you order and manage the card. Unofficial ratings, and note that they cover the whole Swissquote app rather than the card: 4.3 out of 5 on the App Store from 47,913 ratings and 4.3 out of 5 on Google Play from 8,090 ratings, as reported on 11 August 2026 and not read from the stores directly.

If a payment goes wrong, debit card terms exist — Swissquote Bank Europe General Terms and Conditions — but I could not read the PDF text, so dispute and chargeback time frames are not stated to you here. If a merchant holds your money after a declined authorisation, that hold can run for days. Know your terms before you need them.

What can go wrong

Let us take the risks in order of how likely they are to touch you.

The account is closed. This is the headline risk, and it is not hypothetical. In August 2026 Swissquote warned about 600 customers, mostly users of its Yuh app, that accounts could be closed — residents with specific citizenships, some with permanent residence. The CEO says the reasons are economic, the accounts had not been closed at the time of reporting, and no extension was planned beyond those identified. The mechanism is not exotic: anti-money-laundering due diligence that cannot be completed requires the institution to decline the transaction or end the relationship. Nationality is screened separately from residence, which is why people with perfectly valid residency papers were affected.

Slow withdrawals and slow service. On the card pages, no official incidents. Off them, a user report on an aggregator of roughly 49 complaints in 2026 describes slow withdrawals, slow customer service, difficult activation, and accounts left stalled by source-of-funds questions. Trustpilot stands at 3.7 out of 5 from 3,371 ratings, again unofficial and covering all of Swissquote rather than the card. The same summary mentions a 2026 report of a failed flight booking on a Bright card. One report is not a pattern, but if cash timing matters to you, ask about withdrawal speed before you depend on it.

A merchant declines the card. A card number starts with an issuer identification number that tells any shop which institution and country issued it, and shops may apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from your billing address. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards for exactly that reason. Address verification is mainly available in the US, Canada and the UK, and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards — which can cause declines that look arbitrary.

Currency and conversion pain. The 0.95% on Light and Bright applies whenever the payment currency and the account currency differ. Above 5,000 a month, other currencies cost the Mastercard rate plus 1.5%.

A programme or account change elsewhere. This is the category’s pattern, not this company’s record: card programmes do get suspended, and when they do, the sequence is usually a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw what is left. Keep an eye on correspondence.

Controlling where your crypto sits. If you use crypto to fund this card, you are trusting a custodian with the credentials. Custodial platforms have a real history of failure, and crypto transfers are typically irreversible — a stolen key has no recovery path because the network cannot freeze or return funds. Swissquote here is a bank rather than an exchange, and the Luxembourg entity sits in the FGDL deposit guarantee scheme, which is a meaningful difference. It is not the same as holding the keys yourself.

Lost or stolen card. You can block one through Client Services on +352 2603 2003. Virtual cards have built-in safeguards. Whether 2FA and an in-app freeze exist is not stated on the pages I read, so ask. Support runs through a Help Center, a Customer Care contact page and the Client Portal, with Luxembourg Client Services available Monday to Friday plus a contact form and FAQ.

What to take instead

I compared Swissquote against three alternatives on the same criteria. The scores: Swissquote 7.1, Morse 7.5, International Visa Card 6.7, UNi Card 6.1.

Three things stand out.

Morse scores higher, 7.5 against 7.1, and the reason is funding. Its wallet is self-custodial, you can deposit USDC, USDG and EURC over Solana free, and other tokens and blockchains are accepted with a fee. Its card is fully virtual for now, Visa prepaid, spending in any currency from the Morse Balance, with zero FX fees or markups and free payments online and contactless. Eligibility is by residence, not citizenship: you must be 18 and resident in a supported country, with the app in over 140 countries. It cannot serve customers subject to US, UK, EU or UN sanctions, and a set of countries including Australia, Hong Kong SAR China, Japan, New Zealand, Serbia, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand, Türkiye and the UK are in closed beta and need an invite code. Switzerland being on that list matters if you are the reader I assumed.

The International Visa Card is the narrow one. It is a US-issued Platinum Visa, virtual, paying in USD, with the physical card “coming soon.” Issuance is USD 5 one-time with no maintenance fee; plans run Classic free, Pro USD 9 a month, Max USD 19 a month. Card use in USD is free; foreign currency costs the Visa exchange rate plus a 2% FX fee, which is worse than Swissquote’s 0.95% on main currencies and its Elite free allowance. Deposits of any kind are free. No cashback is stated. What it excludes is the point: not available to residents or legal registrants of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam, with FATF grey-list countries reviewed case by case, and purchases blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. The rule is by residence or registration, not citizenship.

UNi Card is the thinnest information. A multicurrency Mastercard spending from the UNi.Global balance, with no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, assets converted at live OTC rates and no hidden exchange fees, plus spend-to-earn rewards up to 3%. But eligibility is not stated, the funding route is not stated, and whether a physical card exists is not stated. I would not open an account on that much silence.

Who I would recommend it to

If you already hold a Swissquote account with a balance you actually spend, take Bright. CHF 6.90 a month waived for six months, five free Swiss ATM withdrawals, free virtual card in parallel, 25,000 a month in spending — that is the sensible default tier, and the free six months mean the cost test is easy.

If you withdraw cash abroad or travel often, look at Elite. CHF 39 a month is a lot next to Bright, and the CHF 100,000 asset requirement is a real gate. You are buying five free withdrawals a month worldwide and free conversion up to CHF 5,000 a month. If you do not use those, you are overpaying.

If you are starting from an outside wallet, do not commit yet. Ask Swissquote directly whether you can fund the card from a self-custody wallet or with stablecoins, and get the answer in writing. The pages do not say, and I would rather you know that than find out after you moved money.

If you are opening an account to escape banking difficulty, weigh the August 2026 warning letters carefully. Around 600 customers were told their accounts could close, with economic reasons given. Whatever you were solving by coming here may not be solved.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Swissquote card?

It is a Mastercard debit card issued by a bank — Swissquote Bank Ltd in Switzerland, or Swissquote Bank Europe in Luxembourg — that can be set to pay from a crypto balance. Three tiers exist: Light, virtual and free; Bright, physical plus virtual at CHF 6.90 a month; and Elite, a metal card at CHF 39. When you choose crypto as the payment method, the app sells only the tokens needed for that purchase, from your Swissquote account balance.

Is Swissquote a bank?

Yes, which is the main thing distinguishing it from crypto card brands. Swissquote Bank Ltd operates in Switzerland, and the Luxembourg page describes Mastercard issued by Swissquote Bank Europe, supervised in Luxembourg by the CSSF and a member of the FGDL deposit guarantee scheme. One detail is unofficial: that the Swiss entity is FINMA-supervised, reported by a third-party site rather than the card pages.

Do I need KYC to get the card?

You need a Swissquote account in your own name, which means full banking KYC and AML — identity verification, a sanctions check, and ongoing monitoring. Elite requires at least CHF 100,000 in total assets. The card pages do not state which documents, what proof of address, or what minimum age apply, and they do not state processing times or rejection reasons, so ask before you start.

How much does the Swissquote card cost?

Light is free monthly. Bright is CHF 6.90, free for the first six months and debited from the seventh. Elite is CHF 39, with cancellation free after six months and two monthly fees before that. Conversion is 0.95% on 13 main currencies for Light and Bright; Elite is free up to CHF 5,000 a month, then 0.25% per transaction.

How do I top up the Swissquote card?

The card spends from your Swissquote bank and trading account balance, not from an external wallet. You make a first deposit at signup, then pick crypto as the payment method in the app and only the tokens needed for each purchase are sold. Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP are supported, with more planned. Stablecoins and external wallets are not named on the card pages, and deposit fees and minimums are not stated there either.

Which countries can use the Swissquote card?

Product and pricing depend on your region of residence, with the site offering Switzerland, Europe, the UK, the Middle East, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong and Rest of World. Physical Bright and Elite cards are listed for 15 countries including Switzerland, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UAE and South Africa. An unofficial August 2026 source reported 35 countries available and 13 restricted, including the US, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela — worth checking, but not confirmed by the card.

Is the Swissquote card safe to use?

The backing is a regulated bank rather than an exchange, and the Luxembourg entity sits in the FGDL deposit guarantee scheme. You can block a lost or stolen card through Client Services on +352 2603 2603 — the number published is +352 2603 2003. Virtual cards have built-in safeguards. Whether 2FA and an in-app freeze are offered is not stated on the pages I read. Crypto held for payments is custodial by nature.

Can I add the Swissquote card to Apple Wallet?

Yes. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported, and a pricing comparison also lists Samsung Pay. The Swiss page additionally lists TWINT and eBill. Tokenised numbers like Apple Pay replace the card number with a device-specific one, and the issuer can restrict a tokenised card to particular channels, so a card that works in a wallet still works physically unless you disable it.

Are there limits on spending or withdrawing?

Yes, and they scale by tier. Monthly payments are 10,000 on Light, 25,000 on Bright and 50,000 on Elite, in CHF, EUR or USD. Monthly ATM withdrawals are 5,000, 10,000 and 10,000; daily ATM withdrawals are 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000. Contactless payments without a PIN are capped at CHF 80. Light also charges CHF 1.90 per Swiss withdrawal and CHF 4.90 abroad.

Is the Swissquote card worth it?

For someone with money already inside Swissquote, yes — free virtual card on Light, a waived first six months on Bright, and no transaction fee on anything. For someone starting from an external wallet, unclear, because the pages do not confirm that route. And for anyone whose reason for looking is banking difficulty, weigh the August 2026 warning to around 600 customers, mostly Yuh users, that their accounts could close, with the company citing economic reasons.

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