clevercircles Review 2024 – Pros & Cons

clevercircles

clevercircles is a relatively new Robo-advisor that started in 2018. The CIC Bank Switzerland developed it. The CIC Bank Switzerland has been a licensed bank in Switzerland since 1909. The CIC Bank Switzerland is a subsidiary of the larger Bank CIC banking group from France. And the CIC group itself belongs to Credit Mutuel, a huge French banking group.

As we will see in the next section, it is a Robo-advisor with a twist because there is also a community element that no other Swiss Robo-advisor has.

To open a clevercircles account, you must be 18 and a Swiss resident.

You can use clevercircles with the web or mobile application on Android and Apple. It is great to have both options.

It is important to note that clevercircles is only available in French and German. There is currently no support for English or Italian.

Investing Strategy

The investing strategy of clevercircles is pretty simple. Based on your answers during the onboarding, they will propose a portfolio composed of index funds and ETFs. Interestingly, they use both index funds and ETFs.

They are only using index funds and passive ETFs. This choice is good because all the chosen funds have low fees and good diversification. So, the default investing strategy makes a lot of sense.

You can also customize your portfolio very profoundly. For instance, I could create a portfolio with 97% (the maximum) in stocks and 3% cash. But I could have used other asset classes:

• Stocks
• Bonds
• Real estate
• Commodities

It is excellent that we can customize the portfolio to our needs. This customization is great for advanced investors. Starting investors can follow the recommended portfolio.

There is a minimum of 5’000 CHF to open an account with clevercircles. I feel like this is a little too high. Several Robo-advisors allow you to create an account with significantly lower minimums.

On the other hand, having a demo account is good for people who want to test the application. But it would be even better if this service could be tried with a lower minimum.

Now, there is a second part to their investing strategy: circles. A circle is a group of investors. You can see them as an investing group. You can belong to several groups and invite people t your groups. The analogy is the same as meeting monthly with friends to discuss investing. At the end of the meeting, you will get a recommendation on how to invest for the following month.

Every two months, all clevercircles users are asked questions about the different asset classes and the future of the markets. This information is then combined within groups to propose rebalancing to the group members. So, if all your group members are bearish on real estate, the system will likely propose you reduce your real estate allocation.

Once you receive such a proposition, you are free to accept it. This offer is just an automated rebalancing proposition based on the point of view of the members of your circle.

I do not like this feature. It makes no sense. Passive investing and asset allocation are here to define your portfolio based on your goal and let the market do the rest. Changing portfolios every two months based on people who have no more clue than you about the market’s future completely defeats the purpose of investing passively.

It has been shown that active investing does not produce better results in the long term than passive investing. clevercircles tries to do something in the middle with an active choice of passive investing products.

So, if you use clevercircles, I recommend against using this feature. You can ignore circles (you will be alone in your circle) and use them as a Robo-advisor. But some Robo-advisors will do that just as well, and probably better.

Investing Fees

When investing for the long term, it is essential to minimize fees. Investing fees are significant and are almost the only thing you have real control over. So, we need to take a good look at the costs of each Robo-advisor.

clevercircles has a relatively simple degressive pricing strategy:

• 0.65% per year by default
• 0.55% per year starting at 100’000 CHF
• 0.45% per year starting at 200’000 CHF

The management fee is a minimum of 40 CHF per year.

In addition to the management, we need to add the fees for the ETFs. These fees depend on the portfolio you are using. A good average for the ETFs from clevercircles is 0.20% per year.

Finally, you will also pay a spread of 0.135% on each foreign operation. If you are primarily investing in foreign currencies, this can make a significant difference. This spread is especially important once you liquidate your portfolio to get the cash out because you will lose 0.135% of your money. It is difficult to estimate how much this will cost annually, but we should not forget this.

Nevertheless, we should also mention that 0.135% currency conversion is very low in Switzerland.

Between the management and ETF fees, the fee is between 0.85% and 0.65% per year. Overall, this is pretty good! clevercircles is among the cheapest Robo-advisors in Switzerland.

Creating an account

I went through the process of creating a demo account to get a feel of the system. You can create such an account very quickly with the usual questions:

• Your personal information
• Your financial information
• Your financial goals
• Your risk capacity

After this, they will propose a portfolio, which you can customize.

However, I had several issues during onboarding. I did the onboarding in French (no English version), and there were several obvious typos. And several of the words were not translated. On top of that, I had issues with the sliders to see my investing values, and when moving the sliders, they were still set to zero. For me, it did not look very professional.

User reviews

Usually, I like to look at reviews of the services I review. However, there are very few reviews available. There is no single review yet on Trustpilot, which is the same as on Google reviews.

On the Apple Store, there are 14 ratings, for an average rating of 4.1 out of 5, but only two complete reviews. On the Play Store, there are 11 reviews with a 4.7 average rating out of 5.

With so few ratings, it is impossible to get an idea of the quality of the service. It is not necessarily a disadvantage. The fact that it is not very mature and few people are seemingly using it is not reassuring if you want to invest a lot of money in the service.

Alternatives to clevercircles

Perfect to get started

Selma Robo Advisor

4.5

Great Robo-Advisor

Invest easily with Selma: a great way to invest in the stock market without the hassle of doing it yourself.

Pros:

• Beginner-Friendly
• Degressive Fees

Invest easily Read my review

There are many good Robo-advisors in Switzerland. So, we should compare clevercircles with these alternatives.

True Wealth has relatively similar fees as clevercircles. But True Wealth has a much more polished set of features. And it helps you follow the market directly, not through dubious active social investing. Read my review of True Wealth for more information.

Selma has higher fees than clevercircles but without the gimmick of social circles. Selma would be easier to use and generate returns closer to the market than clevercircles. If you want more information, you can read my review of Selma.

The circles feature is the only feature from clevercircles that has no alternatives. However, I consider this feature useless and potentially dangerous, so I would not consider it an advantage for clevercircles.

FAQ

clevercircles Summary

clevercicles is a robo-advisor developped by CIC Bank Switzerland, focusing on community.

Product Brand: CIC Bank Switzerland

Editor's Rating:
3

clevercircles Pros

Let's summarize the main advantages of clevercircles:

• Web and mobile application
• Low management fees
• Good customization abilities
• Reasonable minimum to invest (5'000 CHF)

clevercircles Cons

Let's summarize the main disadvantages of clevercircles:

• Very recent Robo-advisor, not mature enough
• It belongs to a French bank
• The community feature is not useful
• Not enough reviews of the tool
• The data on the website is sometimes outdated
• Only available in French and German
• Expensive currency conversion fees
• Many typos on the French version
• The web interface does not work very well
• No English version

Conclusion

I am a little troubled by this offer. I see no advantage in the circles feature that seems to be at the core of this Robo-advisor. If you remove that feature, they are exactly like other Robo-advisors in Switzerland. They have reasonable fees, but so do other Robo-advisors.

A Robo-advisor that only does passive investing without active features like circles would be a better fit for investors. It would be easier and would probably produce better returns in the long term.

They feel much less polished than other Robo-advisors, almost like a beta version of a tool. When I went through onboarding in French, there were several apparent typos and missing translations. Moreover, several features (like sliders) did not work for me during onboarding. I would not trust them to invest my money at this stage.

If you are looking for a good Robo-advisor in Switzerland, I recommend looking at other Robo-advisors.

Have you ever tried clevercircles?

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