CHF/PLN — the Swiss franc against the zloty and the frankowicze story

I still remember conversations with readers in 2015, just after the franc jumped by the equivalent of a few dozen groszy in a single morning. Someone who had taken out a flat loan eight years earlier "in the cheap franc" suddenly saw a balance higher than the sum they had borrowed — even though they had never once missed an instalment. Behind that drama sits one currency pair: CHF/PLN. It's a rate nobody in Poland needs explained, because whole families learned it the hard way.

What CHF/PLN is and how it behaves

CHF/PLN tells you how many zloty it takes to buy one Swiss franc. The base is the franc, the quote is the zloty — when the rate rises, the franc gets more expensive and the zloty weakens. It is an exotic pair: it joins the currency of a small but very stable economy with that of an emerging market. Neither sits in the global top tier of turnover, so the rate itself lacks the liquidity we know from the majors.

In practice this means two things. First, spreads are noticeably wider than on EUR/USD, because fewer market participants mean a higher cost on every trade. Second, the rate can drift quietly for a long time and then jump sharply higher in a moment of global panic. That rhythm — calm broken by sudden surges — is the essence of how the franc behaves against the zloty.

The mechanics: franc times zloty, through a cross rate

The simplest way to grasp where the CHF/PLN price comes from is to treat it as a cross rate. Broadly, it corresponds to EUR/PLN multiplied by the inverse of EUR/CHF. In other words: take how the zloty fares against the euro, and overlay how the franc fares against the euro. When the franc strengthens against the euro while the zloty weakens against the euro, both forces push CHF/PLN higher.

That's why the pair reacts so sensitively to mood. The franc and the zloty sit on opposite sides of the risk divide: the franc is a classic safe haven that capital flees to in uncertain times, while the zloty is the currency of a region that the same capital leaves just then. In calm periods neither side dominates and the rate ripples within a narrow band. When fear returns, both tendencies stack on top of each other and the rate climbs faster than either factor alone would suggest.

What really drives it

The first, long-term factor is the interest-rate gap between the Swiss National Bank and the National Bank of Poland. The SNB is famous for very low, sometimes outright negative rates, while the NBP keeps them clearly higher. That gap can make holding the zloty attractive on a yield basis — but only as long as the market believes in the region's stability. When that belief weakens, the yield premium alone won't defend the zloty.

The second pillar is the franc's safe-haven status. Switzerland is a byword for stability: low inflation, current-account surpluses, political neutrality. In moments of crisis, global capital flows into the franc almost reflexively, regardless of what is happening inside Poland. The third factor is the zloty's sensitivity to EUR/PLN and to risk across Central and Eastern Europe — markets treat the zloty, the forint and the Czech koruna as one basket and sell them together when things turn jittery. If you want to know the safe haven itself better, I covered it separately in the piece on the franc as a safe haven.