A bank-grade Swiss card with crypto spending bolted on — solid, but not built for people outside its footprint

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Swissquote card is not really a crypto card in the usual sense. It is a Mastercard debit card issued by a Swiss bank that happens to let you point a purchase at crypto held in your own Swissquote account, and the app sells just enough of it to cover the amount. If you were expecting a card where you load stablecoins from an external wallet and spend them anywhere, this is a different product with different rules.

My score is 7.1 out of 10. That is a good card with a good cost structure, sitting inside a bank that most people will never be able to open an account with.

This review is for you if you already have — or can plausibly get — a Swissquote account and want a normal-looking debit card attached to it, with crypto spending as an option rather than the main event. It is not for you if the card is your route around a banking system that will not open for you, and it is definitely not for you if your plan depends on moving USDC or USDT in from a self-custody wallet.

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

Verdict: 7.1 / 10, good card, narrow door

Swissquote scores well on the things a payment card is judged on — what it costs to hold, what it costs to spend, whether the money sits in a real regulated bank — and poorly on the one thing people come to crypto cards for, which is flexible funding. Let me walk you through each criterion so you can see where the marks come from.

The audience this card genuinely suits is narrow and worth naming plainly: Swiss-bank clients who want a debit card with crypto payments attached. If that is you, the value proposition is real and the numbers back it up. Light costs nothing to hold, Bright costs less than seven francs a month with a free first half-year, and the Elite tier throws in free currency conversion up to a meaningful monthly volume for people who actually spend abroad.

What holds it back is not the card. It is the doorway. The card requires a Swissquote account in your own name, and which tier you can even apply for is decided by which region on their site selector your residence matches. Then there is the August 2026 news: Swissquote warned roughly 600 customers, mostly users of its Yuh app, that accounts could be closed. CEO Mark Burky said the reasons were “exclusively economic in nature.” The accounts had not been closed at the time, and no extension was planned beyond the roughly 600 people identified. That is a company telling customers, in writing, that it may cut off accounts it has accepted. You should weigh that before you make this card your main spending route.

Will they give you the card?

They will give you the card if all of this lines up. You need a Swissquote account in your own name — not a shared one, not a business account in someone else’s name. And the tier you can get depends on where you live, because Swissquote sorts clients by region before it sorts them by anything else.

Their site selector splits clients into Switzerland, Europe, the UK, the Middle East, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Rest of World. That is not cosmetic: product and pricing change with it. Their starting data lists the countries where physical Bright and Elite cards are available as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, Austria, France, Germany, the UK, Cyprus, Spain, Malta, Monaco, the UAE, South Africa and Greece. Fifteen countries. Note what is not on that list — the US, Canada, India, Brazil, Australia, Japan, most of Latin America. For those of you reading from outside that footprint, the answer to “is Swissquote card available in my country” is probably no, and the virtual Light tier is the only thing plausibly in reach, which itself needs an account.

You will also hear a different number quoted elsewhere: a third-party card comparison site says 35 countries are available and 13 are restricted, naming the US, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela among them. Treat that as unofficial. Swissquote’s own pages do not publish a single availability list in that form, and their country lists have not always matched each other across the different regional sites.

One more thing about who gets in, and it is uncomfortable to read. In August 2026 Swissquote sent letters to about 600 customers warning that their accounts could be closed. These were mostly users of its Yuh app. The chief executive said the reasons were exclusively economic. This tells you that having a Swiss residence permit was not, by itself, protection. Factors like citizenship and money both matter to who the bank wants on its books, and that is a fact about how the risk is priced on their side, not a rule you can plan around.

How to get it

The order of operations is fixed, and it starts further back than a card application.

You open a Swissquote account first. The app offers a simplified opening, but it is still an account opening, which means full banking know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks apply from the start. That includes the ongoing monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting that any regulated bank has to do. There is no shortcut here, and anyone offering you one is offering you something else.

You make a first deposit. That deposit is required before the card step, and it is also what the card will later spend from.

Then you order the card, in the app’s Bank tab or in the desktop platform. The Elite tier has an extra gate: at least CHF 100,000 in total assets at the time you subscribe. That is a portfolio holding, not a deposit you can make this morning to unlock the card.

What the card pages do not tell you is worth knowing before you start. The specific documents you will need, the proof of address, the minimum age, how long processing takes, and the grounds on which an application is rejected — none of that is stated. You will not find a published service level to hold them to. Plan for verification to take the time verification takes, and do not book a trip on the assumption that a card will be in your hand by a particular date.

What you get depends on the tier, and this is where the differences are worth holding on to. It is a Mastercard debit. Light is virtual only. Bright is physical plus virtual. Elite is a metal physical card plus virtual; the metal format detail comes from a third-party comparison site rather than the card pages themselves, so treat it as unofficial. The virtual card is active the moment you order it, which is genuinely useful if you are waiting on plastic.

The currency list runs to thirteen: CHF, USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD, SEK, HKD, NOK, DKK, AED and SGD.

Replacement costs, where stated, are CHF 5 for Bright and CHF 50 for Elite; for Light it is not stated. Cancelling is free on Light and Bright. On Elite it is free after six months, and before that it costs two monthly fees.

Delivery is where the official pages go quiet: delivery time and cost are not stated. Third-party reports are more helpful — a review published in March 2025 said a physical card arrives by post within three to four working days, and a card comparison site said three to four days after approval in August 2026. Unofficial, but consistent with each other, and useful for planning.

Fees: what a Swissquote payment actually costs

Here is the honest cost picture. The headline is good: one tier is free to hold, and if you ever move up, the middle tier is cheap enough that you should read the whole table before deciding.

Now let me put three ordinary payments through that table, because a fee schedule only means something once you know which line it hits.

Coffee in Zurich, on Light, paying from a Swiss franc balance. Nothing is charged. Transaction fees are free on every tier, and if the money is already in CHF there is no conversion at all. This is the case that shows why the Light tier exists — free to hold, free to spend, and no friction on domestic spending.

A hotel in Tokyo, on Bright. Your balance is in CHF, the hotel wants JPY, and JPY is on the thirteen-currency list. You pay 0.95% to convert. The ATM alternative, if you use one, is CHF 4.90 abroad on Bright. On Elite the same booking is free, but only until you have converted CHF 5,000 in a month; past that it is 0.25% per transaction, which is still better than 0.95% and much better than Mastercard rate plus 1.5%.

Anything bought in a currency outside the thirteen, on any tier. You pay the Mastercard rate plus 1.5%. This is the line that punishes people who do not think about it, and it is the first thing to check before you travel somewhere unusual with this card.

Two cost items I could not pin down from the card’s own pages. The first is the crypto conversion fee: it is not stated on the pricing page. The second is a crypto exchange charge on card payments, where a third-party review from March 2025 quotes 1%, with earlier data quoting 1% between EUR 25 and 10k, 0.75% between 10k and 50k, and 0.5% above 50k. All unofficial, all pointing the same way — there is some extra cost when you pay with crypto, and you should ask for the current figure rather than assume a tier.

What you get back is cashback, and this is where the tiers diverge in a way that matters. Cashback is paid as Trading Credit, not cash, and it applies to regular and crypto payments. On the pricing page, the crypto payment rate is 0.5% on Light and 1% on Bright and Elite. Unofficial figures put regular purchases at 0.25% on Light and 0.5% on Bright and Elite, with Elite also offering 0.5% in gold capped at CHF 25 a month, which needs roughly CHF 5,000 of spending to reach. Trading Credit is not withdrawable and expires after three months. Read that as: your cashback is a trading balance with a shelf life, not money in your pocket.

Top up: how the balance gets there

This is the section where the card’s weak score comes from, and it is worth being blunt about, because “top up” means something different here than it means on most crypto cards.

There is no external funding route to speak of. The card spends from your Swissquote account, which is a bank and trading account balance. You make a first deposit to open, and that deposit is the working balance. The deposit fee and minimum are not stated on the card pages.

What the app offers is a payment-method choice at checkout. You select crypto as how the card should pay, and the app sells only the tokens needed for that specific purchase — you are not converting a lump in advance. The supported tokens are Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP, with more planned. Limits may apply when funding crypto exchanges.

Notice what is missing, because you will be searching for it: external wallets and stablecoins are not named. There is no USDC address to send to, no network to choose, no self-custody key involved. If your plan was to hold dollars on-chain and spend them here, that plan does not work with this card as described.

Cashing out works the way a bank account does: cash through ATMs at the rates in the table above. Trading Credit is not cash — do not count it when you are working out what you can actually withdraw. And on closure, the card pages do not state what happens to the balance or to crypto you hold; the balance is a Swissquote bank account, and transfers follow the account terms, so that is where you would look.

For context on why transfers go wrong in this category generally: blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. That is the main practical hazard of top-up cards, and it is largely designed out here — not because Swissquote is safer in the abstract, but because there is no chain transfer to get wrong.

Paying with it every day

Day-to-day use is the strongest part of this card, and the 9 out of 10 reflects real convenience.

The tiers cover three different needs. Light is virtual and free — it exists so you can start spending within minutes of opening. Bright is the practical everyday card: physical plus virtual, five free Swiss ATM withdrawals a month, higher limits. Elite is the metal card with the CHF 100,000 asset requirement, free currency conversion up to CHF 5,000 a month, five free ATM withdrawals in Switzerland and abroad, and the highest limits. Unofficial extras on Elite, from a third-party review: three Priority Pass lounge accesses a year, and insurance if at least half the trip is paid with the card.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported. The pricing comparison also lists Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay, and the Swiss page mentions TWINT and eBill. Adding the card to your phone is straightforward, and because the wallet token is a device-specific number rather than your actual card number, that is the safer way to carry it day to day.

The mobile app has a Bank tab on iOS and Android, and that is where the card is ordered and where crypto is selected at payment. Store ratings for the app come from a third-party aggregator rather than read from the stores themselves: 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. Unofficial, and it covers the whole Swissquote app rather than the card specifically.

Two limits on what you can buy are not stated anywhere I could see: which merchant categories are blocked. That matters if you intend to pay for anything sensitive, and it is worth asking directly. One user report from 2026 describes a flight booking with a Bright card that failed — a reminder that this is a bank debit card, not a travel agent’s guarantee.

On disputes, Swissquote has debit card terms — General Terms and Conditions for Swissquote Bank Europe exist — but the PDF text was not readable to me, so the dispute and chargeback time frames are not stated in what I could check. If a payment goes wrong, that is a gap you should close before you need it.

What can go wrong

Nothing on the card pages itself describes an incident. The risk here is not a card failure; it is counterparty and access risk, and it deserves a clear head.

The account-closure letter is the real story. In August 2026 Swissquote warned around 600 customers, mostly Yuh users, that accounts could be closed. The CEO said the reasons were exclusively economic. At the time no accounts had been closed and no extension was planned beyond those identified. If you are building a spending routine on this card, understand that the bank can decide to end the relationship, and that a permanent residence permit did not protect the people who received those letters.

Withdrawal speed is the most common complaint. Unofficial user reports through a complaint aggregator — around 49 complaints, undated within 2026 — mention slow withdrawals, slow customer service, difficult activation, and account closure stalled by source-of-funds questions. A third-party aggregator gives Swissquote 3.7 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 3,371 ratings, covering the whole company rather than the card. None of this is official, and a low score on a company-wide page is not proof about your card. But if your plan involves moving money out regularly, this is the pattern to plan around.

The bank’s structure is your protection, and its limits too. On the Swiss side the entity is Swissquote Bank Ltd. On the Luxembourg side the Mastercard is issued by Swissquote Bank Europe, supervised in Luxembourg by the CSSF and a member of the FGDL deposit guarantee scheme. That matters: it means this is a bank card, not an e-money card, and customer funds sit in a bank account rather than an e-money balance. It also means the usual card-industry caveat applies differently than with a prepaid card — you should confirm the protection terms for your specific entity rather than assuming.

Help when something goes wrong is reachable. There is a Help Center, a Customer Care contact page and a Client Portal, and Luxembourg Client Services is on +352 2603 2003, CET hours Monday to Friday, with a contact form and FAQ. You can block a lost or stolen card through Client Services, and virtual cards have built-in safeguards. What the pages I read do not confirm is 2FA and in-app freeze, so do not assume the freeze button exists until you have seen it.

Crypto risk sits on top of bank risk. The tokens sold at payment are Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP — volatile assets. Whatever the card does, it does not make the underlying crypto less risky; it just converts a slice of it per purchase. And because transfers are generally irreversible and stolen keys have no built-in recovery, custody with any third party carries real counterparty and hack risk.

What to take instead

If the Swissquote route is closed to you, or you want crypto-denominated funding rather than a bank balance, these are the alternatives I would actually weigh — with the caveat that each has its own unanswered questions.

Reading that table, a few things stand out. Morse scores highest and is the only one of the four with a self-custodial wallet, zero FX markup and free stablecoin transfers on Solana — but it is virtual only, its fees are pointed at a cardholder agreement rather than published, and it is closed-beta in Switzerland and the UK, among others. The International Visa Card is the most restricted by far, with a long exclusion list covering much of Asia and the Middle East plus Russia and Ukraine, and it is virtual only for now. UNi Card promises no foreign transaction fee and up to 3% back, which sounds excellent right up until you notice that neither its eligibility nor its funding route is stated anywhere on the card pages.

If you are outside the fifteen countries with physical cards, your honest comparison is Swissquote Light versus Morse — and on funding flexibility, self-custody and FX, Morse is the stronger fit, provided your country is open to you.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Swissquote card to someone who has a Swissquote account already, lives in a country where their region offers the tier they need, and wants a bank-issued Mastercard that spends from a normal balance while giving them an option to pay with crypto per transaction. For that person it is a 7 or 8 out of 10 card: free or nearly free to hold, transparent conversion fees, Apple Pay and Google Pay, free Swiss ATM withdrawals on Bright, and cashback paid as trading credit.

I would not recommend it as your only card, for two reasons that are not about fees. The first is the account-closure letter: a bank that warns customers in writing that it may close their accounts is telling you something real about how it manages its book, and that risk does not shrink because you have a residence permit. The second is the funding model: with no external wallet and no stablecoins named, the “pay with crypto” feature is a convenience on top of a bank balance, not a way to spend assets you hold yourself.

And I would not recommend it at all if you are trying to solve a banking access problem. This card does not open doors; it sits behind one that is already shut or open on its own terms.

If you are in the fifteen physical-card countries, hold a balance you can afford to have frozen while the August 2026 situation resolves, and you mostly spend in the thirteen main currencies, this is a good card. If any of those three conditions is missing, read the alternatives table again before you commit.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Swissquote card?

It is a Mastercard debit card issued by Swissquote Bank, sold in three tiers: Light (virtual, free), Bright (physical plus virtual, CHF 6.90 a month after a free first six months) and Elite (metal plus virtual, CHF 39, requiring at least CHF 100,000 in assets). It spends from your Swissquote bank and trading account balance, and you can choose crypto as the payment method so the app sells only the tokens needed for that purchase.

How does the Swissquote card work?

You open a Swissquote account, make a first deposit, then order the card in the app’s Bank tab or desktop platform. The virtual card activates immediately. At checkout, if you select crypto as the payment method, the app converts just enough of Bitcoin, Ethereum or XRP to cover the purchase. Otherwise it spends your account balance like an ordinary debit card, with free transaction fees and 0.95% conversion on thirteen main currencies.

Is Swissquote a bank, and who owns it?

On the Swiss side, Swissquote Bank Ltd is the entity named on the Swiss pages. The Mastercard is issued by Swissquote Bank Europe, which is supervised in Luxembourg by the CSSF and belongs to the FGDL deposit guarantee scheme. So this is a bank-issued card rather than an e-money or prepaid card, which is the main reason its fee structure looks like banking rather than like a fintech product.

Is Swissquote card available in my country?

Product and pricing depend on which of their regions your residence matches: Switzerland, Europe, UK, Middle East, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong or Rest of World. Physical Bright and Elite cards are listed for fifteen countries including Switzerland, the UK, Italy, Germany, France, the UAE and South Africa. A third-party site says 35 countries are available and 13 restricted — unofficial, and not confirmed on the card pages.

Does Swissquote card require KYC, and can I get it with crypto only?

Yes, full banking KYC and AML applies, which means identity checks, ongoing monitoring and possible closure if due diligence cannot be completed. There is no crypto-only path: a Swissquote account in your own name must exist first, with a first deposit made, before the card can be ordered. Elite additionally requires at least CHF 100,000 in total assets.

How do I top up the Swissquote card?

There is no external top-up in the usual sense. The card spends from your Swissquote account, funded by bank transfer or card deposit — the deposit fee and minimum are not stated. Crypto is not loaded but spent: choosing crypto at payment sells only the Bitcoin, Ethereum or XRP needed for that purchase. External wallets and stablecoins are not named as a funding route.

What are Swissquote card’s fees and limits?

Light is free to hold; Bright is CHF 6.90 a month, free for six months; Elite is CHF 39. Conversion is 0.95% on thirteen main currencies and Mastercard rate plus 1.5% elsewhere, with Elite free up to CHF 5,000 a month. ATM withdrawals are CHF 1.90 in Switzerland and CHF 4.90 abroad, with five free a month on Bright and Elite. Monthly payment limits run 10,000, 25,000 and 50,000.

Is Swissquote card safe, and can I freeze it?

It is a bank card, so the money sits in a Swissquote bank account, and the Luxembourg entity is in the FGDL deposit guarantee scheme — stronger footing than most crypto cards. You can block a lost or stolen card through Client Services on +352 2603 2003 (CET, Monday to Friday). Two-factor authentication and an in-app freeze were not stated on the pages I checked, so confirm them yourself rather than assuming.

Is Swissquote card worth it?

For someone with a Swissquote account in a supported country, yes: free or near-free holding, transparent conversion fees, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and free Swiss ATM withdrawals on Bright. It is less worth it as a crypto card, since it spends from a bank balance rather than from crypto you hold, and there is an account-closure risk after the August 2026 letters to around 600 customers.

Where can I use the card, and can I add it to Apple Wallet?

You can use it wherever Mastercard is accepted, in person and online, and it works in ATMs. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported, with Samsung Pay listed in a pricing comparison and TWINT and eBill on the Swiss page. Which merchant categories are blocked is not stated, so check before paying for anything sensitive.

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