The Swiss Bank; a bank account which is not linked to your account. When you open a bank account you receive an unique account number and PIN. It is allowed to share the bank account between different players, however it is not allowed to share it with a family account. Once you opened a bank account you can deposit and withdraw money on your account. You do not receive any interest and you are charged 30% on any money you withdraw for the bank account. For the record, that means when you deposit $1,000,000 you receive $700,000 once you withdraw your cash. It is a big loss, which results in a feature which is barely used by the community.
As stated before, when you withdraw money you lose 30% of the originally deposited amount. 30% is a lot and it might be the exact reason why this feature is barely used. You do not receive any interest at the Swiss Bank, which means the only two purposes are sharing a bank account and creating a safe zone for your money. Let’s focus on that ‘safe zone’ of your money. When you are about to die you can create a bank account at the Swiss Bank and deposit all your money. Once it is safe, you can withdraw your money and you ‘only’ lost 30%. Worth it? I believe it is definitely worth, because I rather lose 30% than 100%. On the other hand, there are better ways to make sure that your money is safe. To be more exact; cheaper ways.
Why would you deposit all your money into your Swiss Bank account? To save your money? Well, there are a few other options of saving your money which are much cheaper. The first option is sending your cash to a friend of yours. This means you lose the transfer fee of 10%, twice. Cheaper than the Swiss Bank, but we also have a second option; buying points. Points are automatically transferred to your account when you die, which means it is a safe investment. When you want your cash back you have to sell your points to another player. If you sell the points for the same price as you bought them, you will only lose the transfer fee of 10%. Way better than losing 30%. The result? A feature which is barely used. A few weeks ago we witnessed a rather small update and the official death of the Swiss Bank feature.
A few weeks ago we witnessed a new update; The "Cash" points option is now calculated dynamically at 70% of the current price. With this new update the Swiss Bank feature became even more useless. Technically the ‘Points’ page now included some sort of Swiss Bank feature. You were able to invest your money in points and you have the ability to convert it into cash by losing 30%. Just like the Swiss Bank feature, but no bank account number and no PIN involved. Much easier!
The Swiss Bank. A useless feature? I think it is definitely a useless feature at this moment, however several updates might help. Why is the current percentage set at 30% and not at 15%? The money on the Swiss Bank account is not increasing with any daily interest which means it does not stimulate inflation. What would happen if the current fee of 30% changes to 15%? More players will open a Swiss Bank account, which means the feature is less useless than it is now. Also, the feature can be become much ‘user-friendly’. A bank account number contains 16 numbers and the PIN contains 8 numbers. Make the account numbers a bit shorter and let users have the ability to change their PIN.
The Swiss Bank feature is here for quite some time. What is your opinion of the current feature and what are your suggestions of improving this interesting feature? Please write down your opinion below and let’s start an old fancy feature discussion!
