Swissquote swung to a profit in the first half of this year from a loss incurred in the same period of 2015. The online bank attracted a substantial amount of new money.
Swissquote posted a first-half profit of 11.1 million Swiss francs, compared with a loss of 10.6 million a year earlier, the company said in a statement today. Year-ago results were hit by extraordinary provision of 25 million to cover for negative balances incurred by clients, the bank said.
Pretax profit increased 7.3 percent to 12.6 million francs and net revenues added 1.9 percent to 75.4 million. Net fee and commission income rose 3.3 percent to 34.7 million, and foreign-exchange income was up by 4.9 percent to 28 million.
Record Number of Accounts
The cooperation between Swissquote and Postfinance helped the online trader to boost the number of accounts by 32.3 percent to 300,691, while assets under custody increased by 39.3 percent to 16.1 billion.
Net new money on an organic basis was 812.2 million francs in the first half and 5.2 billion in total, following the acquisition of Postfinance accounts. The transfer of more than 60,000 client accounts from Postfinance to Swissquote was completed on May 17.
Swissquote narrowly missed projections by analysts but still expects full-year profit to grow by more than 10 percent.
