The French of finance: a vocabulary to be maintained

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French has a complete financial vocabulary, forged over the centuries by French-speaking bankers, lawyers and economists and enriched by the terminological work of francophone institutions. The notions of the bill of exchange, the annuity, discounting, the pledge, the fiduciary relationship, wealth management, the investment fund, the structured product or the documentary credit have precise French equivalents, often older than their English counterparts. Parts A to C of this book showed that several of these notions were born or developed in the French-speaking world, from Lyon to Geneva and Paris.

This vocabulary is threatened by the growing use of English in finance, which leads many French-speaking practitioners to use English terms for notions that have a French equivalent, or to copy English turns of phrase. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie and the terminology bodies of France, Quebec and Switzerland publish recommendations and glossaries proposing French equivalents for the English terms of finance.¹ This work is not binding, but it offers practitioners resources for drafting in French without unnecessary anglicisms.

What is at stake goes beyond the purity of the language. A precise and living French financial vocabulary makes it possible to serve French-speaking clients in their own language, to draft documents that French-speaking courts and authorities can understand, and to train young practitioners to reason in French. A financial centre that allowed its French to crumble in favour of an Anglo-French jargon would lose part of the advantage that this Part describes. The present book, written in French with the concern to use French terms wherever they exist, makes a modest contribution to that effort.

Notes

Federal Chancellery, “TERMDAT” page (bk.admin.ch): the terminology database of the Federal Administration, with some 400,000 multilingual entries in German, French, Italian, Romansh and English, maintained by the terminology section of the Central Language Services with the assistance of the multilingual cantons (CoTerm) and available free of charge at termdat.ch; in France, the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française publishes its recommendations on FranceTerme, and in Quebec the Office québécois de la langue française publishes the Grand dictionnaire terminologique (oqlf.gouv.qc.ca). ↩

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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The French of finance: a vocabulary to be maintained

Notes

Setting up or expanding in Switzerland?