Finpension Invest vs VIAC Invest 2025

First, we should look at the investing strategy of Finpension Invest vs VIAC Invest.

Finpension Invest uses Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) for stocks and index funds for bonds. They only use index ETFs which is great. You can invest up to 99% in stocks. On the other hand, you can also be very conservative and hold 99% in a money market fund.

Finpension Invest lets you choose between Global, Switzerland and Sustainable universes, which is very common. You can also decide to invest in Europe or in a specific sustainable impact like Climate Impact. And, you can do your own custom portfolio, by picking directly among all the 45 available ETFs. You can hold up to 10 different portfolios, each with their strategy. And finally, you can also invest in private markets through two institutional funds.

Interestingly, VIAC Invest has a different strategy. They are using their index funds. These are VIAC funds that are only available through VIAC Invest. And these funds are funds of funds, meaning they do not hold stocks or bonds directly, but instead hold funds from other providers (like UBS). You can invest up to 99% in stocks at most. And you can hold up to 99% in cash or bonds if you want to be conservative. For the part not invested in stocks, you can decide between bonds or cash.

You can pick within the standard Global, Switzerland and Sustainable universes as well. You can also do a custom portfolio by selecting between the 15 VIAC funds. This is more limited than in some places because you cannot pick the sub-funds, only the VIAC funds.

When comparing Finpension Invest vs VIAC Invest, we conclude that both investing strategies are great. I would expect both strategies to yield the same results. If you want to invest in private markets, Finpension Invest has an advantage. But if you prefer to hold cash (and not money market funds), VIAC Invest has an advantage. And finally, if you would like to create custom portfolios, Finpension Invest is much more flexible.

If two services have comparable investing strategy, their fees is what will differentiate them in terms of total returns. Indeed, if they have about the same performance, the cheaper service will result in higher returns. So, we must now compare Finpension Invest vs VIAC Invest, in terms of fees.

Finpension Invest has two components in its total fee. They have a 0.30% custody fee and a 0.09% wealth management fee. We also must pay the TER of the funds, with an average yearly fee of 0.10%. This gives us a total fee of 0.49% per year.

VIAC Invest has a 0.25% administration fee. Additionally, you must pay for the funds themselves. On average, the funds from VIAC Invest will cost 0.24%, giving us a total of 0.49%.

As far as recurring fees go, both services have the same fee of 0.49%. Recurring fees are essential because you will pay it every year on everything that has been invested.

However, we must also look at one-time fees. These are the fees that happen when some money is invested into the Robo-advisor.

Finpension Invest is using ETFs, so they charge Swiss stamp duty on each transaction (buy and sell). The transaction costs themselves are included into the recurring fees. And since they are trading ETFs, there will be some market spread (premium we pay compared to the market price). On the other hand, there are no issuance or redemption fees with ETFs. And the currency conversion fee is already included.

VIAC Invest already includes stamp duty in its yearly fee, as well as the currency conversion fees and the transaction costs. Since they are using funds, there is no spread. However, these funds have issuance and redemption fees. These fees depend on your portfolio because they are different for each fund (and each sub-funds). For the default portfolio with 100% stocks, we get an average 0.07% purchase fee and a 0.14% sale fee.

Overall, the one-time fees of both services are very similar. If you use a portfolio with low issuance and redemption fees, VIAC Invest may be slightly cheaper. But if you use a portfolio with high fees, Finpension Invest may be slightly cheaper.

So, overall, we can say that Finpension Invest and VIAC Invest have the same fees.

It is worth mentioning that both services offer 0% management fee in 2025. This makes Finpension Invest cheaper in 2025 than VIAC Invest, since the saved management fee is higher (0.39%) than for VIAC Invest (0.25%). However, since we should consider services for the long term, I would not a temporary fee reduction as criteria.

Tax efficiency is often overlooked because it is not a direct fee. But when we deal with optimized Robo-advisors, it is very important to look into this. Indeed, the returns lost to unreclaimable withheld dividends can be very significant. Therefore, we must compare Finpension Invest vs VIAC Invest on tax efficiency.

Finpension Invest uses ETFs from Ireland, and Ireland has a tax treaty with the United States. As a result, they apply a tax withholding of 15% (reduced from a default of 30%) to dividends from the United States (which are about 66% of the world’s stock exchange). This is equivalent to an annual fee of about 0.15% on your portfolio.

Additionally, Finpension is doing something unique. They have made a deal with BlackRock so that they can provide the necessary documentation to reclaim even this 15% on your tax declaration. Currently, this technique has only been approved by Lucerne, but other cantons may approve it. If you are in a canton that approves this, you can fill a DA-1 and get back the withheld dividends (just like you would if you were using US ETFs). This optimization results in no fees lost to dividend withholding.

VIAC is quite different in this matter. They are using Swiss funds, meaning this will get a withholding rate of 30%. A small optimization is that this fund itself holds 20% of the assets in Ireland, resulting in 15% withholding. This results in an average of 27% withholding rate. And this rate is equivalent to a 0.26% annual fee.

As a result, Finpension Invest is much more tax efficient than VIAC Invest. By default, you would save 0.11% per year with Finpension Invest. And if you are in a canton where you can reclaim the DA-1 from Finpension Invest, you could even save 0.26% per year.

It is essential to look at the security and safety of a Robo-advisor before starting to invest. So, we will compare Finpension Invest vs VIAC Invest on these two subjects.

Both companies are now well-established. Finpension has been profitable since 2019. While we do not know the details, VIAC is expected to be in a good financial shape and growing. Both of these companies are managing more than 3 billion CHF. It is currently unlikely that any of them bankrupts.

If Finpension was to bankrupt, the shares would be safe since they are segregated from Finpension’s assets. Regulators would have to find another manager for these shares, and we would get them back. The same would happen for VIAC where segregation also happens. It could be slightly more complicated for VIAC since they use VIAC funds. But I expect no shares to be lost in either cases. If the custody bank of VIAC (Regiobank) would bankrupt, VIAC itself would have to find another custody bank and would take care of transferring the assets. In all events, if are to learn from the recent FlowBank bankruptcy, it could take a while to get back our shares.

From a technical security standpoint, neither of these companies had any known security issue since their creation. They both offer a second factor of authentication. VIAC offers SMS 2FA while Finpension offers a superior TOTP 2FA. This is a small advantage for Finpension Invest.

Overall, I would say that both companies are quite safe. The only difference remains in how they handle 2FA.

Finally, we can also look at the reputation of Finpension Invest vs VIAC Invest.

Both companies are very well established. Both are offering excellent services and users are generally quite happy about what they are doing. From what I hear among my readers, I would say that both companies have an excellent reputation. It is interesting though that they are not viewed in the same way:

• VIAC is generally viewed as a friendly and young company with good results.
• Finpension is usually regarded as a more professional entity that deals serious business.

Unfortunately, there are not many objective reviews online. From what we can find on the Play Store and on the Apple Store, both apps have very good reviews. There are not enough reviews on Trustpilot to draw conclusions. And most VIAC reviews on Google are only there to share referral codes.

Overall, I would say that both companies have an excellent reputation. They are perceived slightly differently by the public, but are trusted by their customers.

We can draw a table summary of our findings:

Best Robo-advisor	Good Robo-advisor
Finpension Invest	VIAC Invest
Primary Rating: 5.0	Primary Rating: 4.0
Pros: Great investing strategy Great fees Good reputation Excellent dividend tax efficiency Access to private markets Very good customization	Pros: Great investing strategy Great fees Good reputation
Cons: Cannot invest in cash	Cons: Not very efficient for dividend withholding Limited customization
0.49% per year	0.49% per year
Invest now with code FEYKV5	Invest Now
Read our review	Read our review

Best Robo-advisor

Finpension Invest

Primary Rating:

5.0

Pros:

• Great investing strategy
• Great fees
• Good reputation
• Excellent dividend tax efficiency
• Access to private markets
• Very good customization

Cons:

• Cannot invest in cash

0.49% per year

Invest now with code FEYKV5

Read our review

Good Robo-advisor

VIAC Invest

Primary Rating:

4.0

Pros:

• Great investing strategy
• Great fees
• Good reputation

Cons:

• Not very efficient for dividend withholding
• Limited customization

0.49% per year

Invest Now

Read our review

We can draw a few conclusions regarding Finpension Invest vs VIAC Invest from this summary:

• Both services let you invest up to 99% in stocks
• Both services have the same general fees
• Finpension 3a is more optimized for dividend withholding
• VIAC lets you invest in cash or bonds, while Finpension Invest only has bonds and money market funds
• Finpension has much greater customization ability