Conclusion of Part K and of the book

Read the PDF edition (2 pages)

Part K has described six areas of work. The first concerns crypto-assets and digital assets, for which the Swiss framework is established and for which the tokenisation of traditional assets is the infrastructure issue of the decade. The second is sustainable finance, which has become an ordinary dimension of asset management and a field of regulation in which Switzerland has chosen transparency and self-regulation; the third is competition between financial centres, where Hong Kong has joined Switzerland in first place and where Geneva retains advantages of its own. Then come technology and artificial intelligence, which the financial centre buys, adopts and must govern, followed by relations with the European Union, whose 2026 package sets the framework without settling financial services, and finally the scenarios that combine these areas of work. One thread links them: trust, which Geneva has been selling since the fairs of the fifteenth century and which each of these areas puts to the test in a new form.

The whole book can be summed up in a single proposition. Geneva became an international financial centre because, in every era, it knew how to sell the world a form of trust suited to its time: the transactional security of the fairs, the reliability of the Huguenot network, the discretion of the private banker, the competence of the asset manager, the organisation of the commodity trader, the neutrality of the arbitrator, the meeting place of International Geneva. It lost that position whenever it confused trust with secrecy, stability with immobility, or prosperity with vested rights. It regained it whenever it agreed to transform itself without denying what sets it apart: a French-speaking city, Protestant by origin, international by vocation, small in size and great in its network, where the world comes to find what it cannot find elsewhere.

In 2035, the Geneva financial centre will be what its actors, its authorities and its citizens have made of it. This book has sought to provide them with the facts, the history and the questions, the answers to which are theirs. The author, who has practised across several financial centres and several languages, expresses the hope that Geneva will remain what it has become over five centuries: a place of trust, whose prosperity has to be earned every day.

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.