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Hinter den Zahlen: das Rekordjahr von Swissquote | Unlocked

·36 min·3 clips

Swissquote's founder reflects on achieving 8.5 billion in new money, a record high for the bank.

1. Swissquote CEO Marc Bürki sits down with the 'Unlocked' podcast to mark the bank's 30th anniversary and review its 2025 record results. 2. Bürki co-founded Swissquote with Paolo Buzzi, whom he met at EPFL in Geneva when Buzzi was chatting up his then-girlfriend — a 30-year friendship that outlasted the relationship. 3. The episode's thesis is that Swissquote's growth stems from a persistent startup mentality inside an increasingly large institution, now with nearly 1,500 employees and Category 3 regulatory status. 4. Swissquote attracted 8.5 billion CHF in net new money in 2025, up from half a billion per year in earlier periods, which Bürki calls proof that customers endorse the bank's services. 5. The bank recorded a 420 million CHF pre-tax profit in 2025 — a record — with 370 million attributable to organic operations after stripping out a 50-million one-off from the full consolidation of the You neobank subsidiary. 6. Swissquote reached Category 3 bank status in Switzerland, placing it among fewer than 30 banks in the top 10% by size, bringing stricter FINMA oversight and requiring significant investment in compliance staffing. 7. Bürki describes Swissquote's competitive strategy as being the 'first bank relationship' in Switzerland — replacing the prior model where Swissquote was always the second account alongside a customer's salary bank. 8. Outside Switzerland, the bank does not pursue retail mass business; in Luxembourg, for example, it targets the 'mass affluent' segment — customers with deposits of 500,000 to 1 million CHF — which Bürki says is underserved globally. 9. Growth drivers for 2026 include the full integration of the You neobank, leveraging PostFinance's ongoing shareholding and the appointment of PostFinance's former CEO as incoming Swissquote Group president. 10. Bürki says Swiss National Bank deposit rates are already negative for banks holding more than 2 billion CHF, and he does not rule out those costs being passed to retail customers if geopolitical safe-haven flows continue strengthening the franc. 11. On AI, Bürki argues that whether or not today's AI valuations constitute a bubble, 'AI will not burst the way the internet did not burst' — the underlying transformation is permanent. 12. Swissquote has deployed 400 GitHub Copilot licenses, 40 Cloud AI development licenses, and 20 Nvidia H200 GPUs internally, and Bürki frames owning the tech stack as critical to not ceding control to external vendors. 13. Bürki predicts near-future banking will shift to voice-controlled AI agents at the OS level of smartphones, citing an unspecified phone brand launching in March with AI that operates across apps via natural language. 14. Swissquote is launching a Julia AI assistant that lets customers query their own transaction data; Bürki tested it and found he spent 210 CHF on fast food in the past year, while the You CEO spent 700 CHF. 15. Bürki is careful to note that not all AI companies will survive and cites an OpenAI co-founder raising 1 billion euros to start a European AI company as a sign of overvaluation in parts of the sector. 16. On geopolitics, Bürki says the return of bloc-based world politics — U.S. versus China and Russia — complicates operations for a multinational bank like Swissquote, giving the example of its Dubai branch where staff had to be redeployed to Switzerland and London during the Middle East conflict. 17. The episode's tone is conversational and candid; Bürki answers questions in fluent, colloquial English with occasional code-switching into German technical terms, and the interviewer uses his first name. 18. There are no hard-edged debate moments; Bürki consistently expresses optimism tempered by practicality, using phrases like 'I don't want to catastrophize' and 'we can survive almost every event.' 19. Listeners who follow European fintech growth stories, Swiss banking regulation, or founder-operated companies will find the most relevance here. 20. Listeners expecting macroeconomic analysis, interest-rate forecasts, or retail investment advice will find this episode largely off-topic, as it is primarily a founder interview about company culture and growth strategy.

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