Current accounts facilitate payments between customers and the IPI. Find out how to apply for a current account and initiate the payment of fees quickly and easily.

A current account with the IPI allows you to settle payments simply. Individuals, legal entities and legal communities that regularly receive payments from us or make payments to us are entitled to a current account.

To open a current account, please complete the request form and the signing rules and send them to us with a handwritten signature.

Please make an initial deposit as soon as the account is open.

You can initiate payments to be debited from a current account by creating a debit order in our online service. To do so, you’ll need the numbers of the requests, applications or IP rights that you’d like to pay an outstanding fee for. Online orders are normally executed automatically on the same day.

Find out more about the online service

Exception: do not use the online service to initiate a debit order for a fee that has not yet been charged. This may be the case, for example, if you request expedited examination, if you file an opposition or a cancellation request, or if you apply to register a trade mark. In these cases, you can submit the debit authorisation directly with your request or opposition or with your trade mark application via e-Trademark.

If the debit order is for one fee only, you can send it to us in writing in an email to financenot shown@ekomm.ipito make life hard for spam bots.ch or by post. The debit order must include the number of the account to be debited as well as the details necessary to clearly identify the purpose of the payment. Such orders are executed manually and can take several days to complete.

We will always consider the date on which we receive the debit order as the date of receipt of the payment.

When you place a debit order, you’re responsible for ensuring that there are sufficient funds available in your account to cover all debit order instructions issued but not yet executed at that point in time. We do not guarantee that we will execute debit orders in the same chronological order as the due dates of the fees in question.

Please also note that you can expect deposits to take a few days to be processed. This may mean that your cover is too low at the time of the debit, despite your deposit, because the deposit has not yet been booked to your current account. When you use the online service, your current account balance and your expected balance after execution of an order are displayed. You can thus see whether the deposit has already been booked or not.

If there are insufficient funds, the debit order will be rejected. It will not be executed, meaning that the payment is not valid. We will not try to debit the payment a second time. We cannot take account of deposits paid into the current account at a later date to restore the necessary cover. A payment deadline that has not yet expired will remain unchanged if a debit attempt fails.