Market structure and consolidation

The size of the sector in Ticino

The statistics of the Canton of Ticino do not distinguish between licensed portfolio managers, trustees, fund distributors and other non-bank financial firms, but they show the weight and the structure of the sector. In 2023 the canton counted 874 enterprises in financial activities outside banking, with 3,644 employees and 3,031 fulltime equivalents, an average of about 3.5 full-time positions per enterprise. The accounting and tax advisory sector, in which the commercial fiduciaries are classified, comprised 2,427 enterprises with 7,252 employees and 5,500 full-time equivalents. Real estate activities accounted for a further 848 enterprises and insurance for 300.¹ The non-bank financial sector is thus a world of small firms, as is the world of the commercial fiduciaries.

Sector in Ticino, 2023 Enterprises Employees FTE Non-bank financial activities 874 3,644 3,031 Accounting and tax advice 2,427 7,252 5,500 Real estate activities 848 2,546 1,508 Insurance activities 300 2,106 1,758

The comparison with earlier figures is imperfect because the statistical categories differ, but the trend is visible. In 2009 the Centro di Studi Bancari counted 1,640 fiduciary firms, of which about a fifth were financial fiduciaries, with 6,353 employees in the fiduciary sector as a whole.² The cantonal register held 1,500 authorized fiduciari at the end of 2018. The parliamentary commission estimated in 2021 that between 376 and 500 of them had been financial fiduciaries who moved to federal supervision.³ Not all of them obtained a FINMA licence. Some retired, some joined other firms as employees, some transferred their clients to banks, and some reduced their activity below the thresholds of commercial activity or to the management of family assets.

The national picture

At the national level the independent asset management industry consists of about 1,431 licensed firms, of which the median firm has 3.3 employees, 68 clients and CHF 140 million in assets under management, up from CHF 103 million five years earlier. The industry as a whole manages an estimated CHF 500 billion.⁴ The increase in median assets reflects both market performance and the disappearance of the smallest firms, which did not apply for a licence or merged before the end of the transitional period. Before the transition, estimates of the number of independent managers in Switzerland ranged from about 2,200 to 2,400, so that the number of active firms has fallen by roughly a third to two fifths since 2020.⁵

Predictions and reality

During the transition many observers expected a dramatic consolidation. The Ticino manager Crossinvest then managed more than CHF 3 billion from Lugano, Locarno and Zurich. In October 2021 the head of its Zurich office predicted a significant decline in the number of independent asset managers and pointed to Germany, where only about a tenth of firms were said to have survived the implementation of MiFID II.⁶ Aggregators such as the Aquila Group in Zurich, Corum and Cinerius, backed by the American investor Summit Partners, positioned themselves to acquire small firms whose owners did not want to bear the cost of the licence.⁷

The outcome was more modest. The asset managers' association reported in May 2026 that the "much-discussed wave of consolidation has largely remained theoretical", with only about twenty mergers since 2022, and that new firm creation was reversing the earlier decline: FINMA received 61 new licence applications in 2025.⁸ The decline in numbers came mainly from firms that never applied, withdrew their applications or gave up the licence soon after obtaining it, while mergers between licensed firms remained rare. Among the Lugano examples is the merger of Zest SA and LFG Holding SA, announced in June 2022, which created a group with about 700 clients, CHF 2.5 billion of assets under management and about fifty employees in Lugano and Zurich. The chief executive of LFG Holding, Massimo Borghesi, said that the industry needed consolidation to meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, and the chief executive of Zest, Enrico Guagni, said that the minimum critical mass of assets for healthy growth was rising significantly.⁹ The FINMA list of directly supervised group companies shows that aggregators have also established themselves in Ticino, with entities in Lugano and Stabio.¹⁰

Notes

1. USTAT, 12 Denaro e banche, March 2026 (above). ↩
2. Chopard, Dati 4-2010 (above). ↩
3. Commissione Costituzione e leggi, Rapporto 7753 R (above). ↩
4. Schwab, finews.com, 19 May 2026 (above). ↩
5. FINMA, press release of 7 July 2020 (above) (2,206 declarations); finews.ch/ticino, October 2021 (above) (about 2,400 firms). ↩
6. finews.ch/ticino, October 2021 (above). ↩
7. finews.ch/ticino, October 2021 (above). ↩
8. Schwab, finews.com, 19 May 2026 (above); FINMA, Annual Report 2025 (above). ↩
9. "Un'importante fusione a Lugano", finews.ch/ticino, 27 June 2022, https://www.finews.ch/ticino/52076-zest-lfg-holding-lugano-zurigo-massimo-borghesi-enrico-guagni; laRegione, 28 June 2022, https://www.laregione.ch/cantone/luganese/1592126/servizi. ↩
10. FINMA, list of directly supervised group companies, as at 4 October 2026 (above). ↩

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 August 2025.