Digital skills: training the financial centre

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The transformation described in this chapter calls for skills that the financial centre possesses only in part. Geneva institutions recruit data scientists, security engineers, artificial intelligence specialists and systems architects, in competition with technology companies, international organisations and foreign financial centres. They also train their existing staff in the use of the tools. The centre’s training institutes, described in Part J, have created courses in digital finance, in crypto-assets and digital assets, and in data analysis. The University and the universities of applied sciences offer specialised programmes, while the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, a few dozen kilometres away, supplies part of the next generation.¹

Digital competence is not confined to specialists. An adviser, a lawyer, a compliance officer or an executive must understand what the tools do, what they do not do and how their results can be verified. Institutions that have built this general training into their programmes find that tools are adopted more quickly, errors are less frequent and resistance is lower. The financial centre, which made competence its argument after the end of banking secrecy, must extend that argument to the digital sphere.

Notes

Institut supérieur de formation bancaire (ISFB, isfb.ch): non-profit professional association founded in 1987, bringing together more than fifty banking and financial institutions of French-speaking Switzerland, which offers, together with the HEG Genève (more than 2,000 students a year), academic-level programmes (DAS in strategic and operational management, DAS in advisory and distribution of financial services, CAS in corporate client advisory). ↩

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.

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Dr Alexander Ressos, TEP

Rechtsanwalt/Attorney-at-Law

I am a Swiss attorney-at-law and also admitted as a solicitor in Hong Kong and in England & Wales, with almost 25 years of experience.

Together with my multilingual team, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian and French native speakers, I advise companies and their owners from around the world on the full range of banking, corporate, commercial and tax law matters in Switzerland, including international tax planning, fiduciary services, and legal family office services including immigration & relocation or real estate investments. My practice has a particular focus on clients from growth and frontier markets in Greater China, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the rest of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, and I equally advise clients from Europe and North America. Through an affiliated Swiss trust company, we also take care of the incorporation and ongoing administration of their companies and other structures, including accounting, tax returns and corporate secretarial services, and I serve as a professional director where required. With the support of a network of first-class cooperation partners, I also implement solutions worldwide.

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Digital skills: training the financial centre

Notes

Setting up or expanding in Switzerland?