Swiss financial regulation is not a fixed body of text, and 2026 is a year in which a great deal of it moves at once.
Between new FINMA circulars, the final Basel III standards now embedded in the Capital Adequacy Ordinance, the too-big-to-fail reform that followed the collapse of Credit Suisse, and a federal register of beneficial owners arriving in October, the rules that apply to a Swiss bank today are not the rules that applied in 2023. Keeping track means reading four Swiss authorities and, for most institutions of any size, several American ones.
Swiss Banking Regulations follows those primary sources — FINMA, the Swiss National Bank, SECO, the Federal Council and Parliament, and the US federal banking agencies — and publishes short, factual articles on what changed, when it takes effect and who it applies to. Every article cites the official source it came from, so a reader can go straight to the instrument itself. The site is free to read and needs no account. It is informational: it connects to no accounts, holds no data about your clients and moves no money.
Swiss Banking Regulationsswissbankingregulations.ch →
What the Swiss side covers.
Supervision, capital, liquidity, financial crime, sanctions and conduct — the authorities that between them set the perimeter for a bank in Switzerland.
FINMA
Supervision and circulars
The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority licenses banks and sets the supervisory detail through its circulars. Coverage includes the small-bank regime, the supervisory categories that decide how much of the rulebook applies to a given institution, and new circulars as they enter force — among them Circular 2026/1 on nature-related financial risks, phased in from 1 January 2026 for climate risk and extending to all nature-related risks from 1 January 2028.
Capital · CAO · Basel III
Capital adequacy
The final Basel III standards entered Swiss law through the amended Capital Adequacy Ordinance on 1 January 2025: revised standardised approaches for credit, market and operational risk, the output floor on internal models, and the 8% minimum of risk-weighted assets with its Common Equity Tier 1 and Tier 1 components.
Too big to fail
The post-Credit Suisse reform
On 22 April 2026 the Federal Council adopted its dispatch on amending the Banking Act, requiring systemically important banks to back participations in foreign subsidiaries fully with Common Equity Tier 1 capital — roughly half of those holdings are debt-financed today. Parliament took it up in summer 2026. The accompanying Capital Adequacy Ordinance amendments are set to enter force on 1 January 2027, with a seven-year transition for the Banking Act changes and a two-year window for the new three-year cap on software amortisation.
SNB · liquidity
Liquidity and the public backstop
The liquidity coverage ratio and net stable funding ratio under the Liquidity Ordinance, the exemptions available under the small-bank regime, the Swiss National Bank's role in emergency liquidity assistance, and the public liquidity backstop introduced after 2023 — a federal guarantee standing behind SNB liquidity to a systemically important bank.
AMLA · Transparency Act
Financial crime and beneficial ownership
The revised Anti-Money Laundering Act extends due diligence duties to advisers involved in forming, managing or structuring legal entities and in certain real-estate transactions. Alongside it, the Transparency Act creates a federal register of beneficial owners maintained by the Federal Office of Justice, in force on 1 October 2026: reporting within one month, a threshold of 25% of capital or votes, staged deadlines of two months to two years for entities that already exist, and access restricted to authorities and financial intermediaries rather than the public.
SECO · sanctions
Sanctions and embargoes
The ordinances SECO administers under the Embargo Act, where Switzerland adopts EU packages and where it diverges, the reporting and freezing duties they place on banks, and how they sit next to the US programmes covered on the other side of the product.
Deposit protection
Depositor safeguards and the fintech licence
Privileged deposits and the esisuisse scheme, what is covered and what is not, and the review of the Banking Act's fintech licensing provisions that the State Secretariat for International Finance has been drafting — where deposit protection and capital requirements for smaller, technology-led institutions are being reconsidered against European frameworks.
FinSA · FinIA
Conduct and investor protection
Client segmentation, suitability and appropriateness, the duty to inform, the basic information sheet, and the documentation and record-keeping that has to exist behind an advisory relationship.
Why a Swiss bank has to read Washington too.
A Swiss institution with a US branch, a broker-dealer affiliate, American clients or dollar clearing sits inside the reach of US rules — sometimes with no US presence at all. The product covers the agencies that matter.
Fed · OCC · FDIC
Capital and prudential rules
In March 2026 the three federal banking agencies re-proposed the US implementation of Basel III, replacing the dual-calculation approach with a single Expanded Risk-Based Approach. Mandatory scope narrowed to Category I and II firms, with Category III and IV able to opt in; aggregate Common Equity Tier 1 requirements fall rather than rise, by roughly 4.8% for Category I and II. The comment period closed on 18 June 2026. Intermediate holding companies of foreign banking organisations sit inside this framework.
OFAC
Sanctions
Office of Foreign Assets Control programmes, the SDN and sectoral lists, the 50 percent rule on ownership, and the secondary-sanctions and dollar-clearing exposure that makes OFAC a live concern for institutions with no American footprint.
FinCEN
Financial crime and reporting
Bank Secrecy Act obligations, suspicious activity reporting, the customer due diligence rule and the beneficial ownership reporting regime — read next to the new Swiss transparency register, since the two now ask related questions in different formats and on different deadlines.
SEC
Securities and disclosure
Where cross-border advisory, distribution and broker-dealer activity touches US securities law, which registration or exemption a Swiss institution is relying on, and the disclosure that follows from it.
IRS · FATCA · QI
Tax reporting
FATCA reporting under the Switzerland–US agreement, the qualified intermediary regime and its withholding and documentation duties, and how both interact with the automatic exchange of information Switzerland operates with other partner states.
DOJ
Enforcement and precedent
The deferred and non-prosecution agreements that reshaped Swiss–US banking practice, the compliance expectations they left behind, and what later enforcement has confirmed or moved.
Built for people who have to be right about this.
Compliance and legal teams
In-house compliance officers, general counsel and risk functions who need to know what changed this quarter and when it bites — without reading four regulators' websites end to end.
Advisers and auditors
Lawyers, consultants and audit teams working across Swiss and American requirements for banking clients, who need the cross-border picture in one place rather than two.
Students and newcomers
Anyone learning Swiss financial market law. Following the site is a way to watch the regulators work week by week, and each article points at the text it is reporting on.
How it works
Every article cites its official source — a FINMA circular or press release, an SNB announcement, a SECO ordinance, a Federal Council dispatch, a notice in the Federal Register — and links straight to it. Where something has been proposed but is not yet law, the article says so, with the stage it has reached and what still has to happen. Articles are short on purpose: the job is to tell you what happened and send you to the instrument. New ones go out by RSS and on LinkedIn.
The site is built and run by BNA CH on our own infrastructure. Articles are produced with AI assistance and human oversight, and the models that summarise and cross-reference the material run on hardware we own — so the sources and the working notes stay inside the system rather than passing through a third-party model provider.
At a glance
- Scope
- Switzerland + US
- Languages
- EN · DE · FR
- Access
- Free, no account
- Publisher
- BNA CH S.A.R.L
No account access, no client data, no payments. The site publishes news and cites its sources.
Swiss Banking Regulations is published for information. It is not legal, tax or regulatory advice, and it does not replace the original texts or the judgement of a qualified professional. Always verify against the instrument in force before acting.
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