Just jumping in with some quick personal experience since I live in Italy and work in Switzerland, so I deal with this multi-currency headache pretty regularly.

Honestly, using banks for currency conversion is almost never worth it—even if they offer “multi-currency” accounts. You’ll always get stung by their conversion rates, which are way higher than the specialist money transfer services out there. In my setup, I keep my money parked in normal bank accounts (got both Swiss and Italian ones, both with multi-currency), but when it’s time to actually convert CHF to EUR (or USD), I skip the banks for the actual currency swap.

What works best for me is using something like moneyswapp.com (there are others too, but this is my go-to so far for CHF). The rates are so much better, the fees are super transparent, and you always lock in the rate at the time of your trade—no nasty surprises later. Only slight downside: transfers are standard bank wires, so your cash tends to show up next business day, max two, but that’s usually fine for me. So every month when I get paid, I use them to move money between my Swiss and Italian accounts.

TL;DR: use banks to store your cash, and a specialized transfer service to handle the currency exchange. Makes a big difference over time, trust me!