Measuring a regional financial centre

Why Lugano is hard to count

A financial centre that is not a canton and has no stock exchange of its own does not appear as such in any official statistic. Federal statistics count banks by their legal seat, enterprises and jobs by their place of work, and assets under management, if at all, by the booking centre of the bank as a whole. None of these measures coincides with "Lugano". A bank with its head office in Zurich and a large private banking floor on the Riva Caccia appears in the Zurich column of the bank statistics and in the Ticino column of the employment statistics. A Ticinese bank with a branch in Geneva books its Geneva clients in Lugano. An Italian client's portfolio that is advised by an independent asset manager in Lugano and held by a custodian bank in Zurich does not show up in any Ticino figure at all. For these reasons every quantitative statement about the Lugano banking market rests on a choice among imperfect proxies, and the choice must be stated before the figures are used.¹

The main proxies are four. The first is the number of banks present in the canton, whether through a head office, a branch or both, which the Ufficio di statistica del Cantone Ticino (USTAT, the cantonal statistical office) publishes by category of institution on the basis of the Swiss National Bank's banking statistics. The second is employment in banking, taken from the federal enterprise statistics (STATENT) and expressed both in persons and in full-time equivalents. The third is the stock of savings deposits and mortgage loans booked by banks for borrowers and savers in Ticino, a series that USTAT has kept since 1965. The fourth is the value added of the financial sector, which is not part of the official cantonal accounts in detail and has to be estimated by economic institutes such as BAK Economics in Basel.² Each proxy captures something different. The number of banks measures the institutional diversity of the centre, employment measures its weight in the labour market, savings and mortgages measure its domestic business, and value added measures its economic contribution. None of them measures the foreign private banking business that made Lugano famous, which is the main reason why the public debate about the financial centre has so often relied on estimates of "Italian money" whose sources are difficult to trace.

The statistical sources

The most important single source for the present chapter is the USTAT publication Denaro e banche (money and banks), chapter 12 of the cantonal statistical yearbook, whose edition of March 2026 contains data up to 2024 for banks and branches and up to 2023 for employment.³ It is complemented by a series of analytical articles published between 2006 and 2015 in the USTAT review Dati – Statistiche e società by René Chopard, the long-standing director of the Centro di Studi Bancari in Vezia, often with Franco Citterio, Alberto Petruzzella and other bankers as co-authors. These articles give annual figures for the years 2007 to 2014 and describe the structure of the Ticino banking system in a way that the later tables no longer do.⁴ For the national context the chapter uses the Swiss Bankers Association's Banking Barometer, whose 2026 edition covers the year 2025.⁵ The Swiss National Bank's annual report Banks in Switzerland, long the standard reference for bank-level data, was discontinued in June 2020 after the edition covering 2019. Its data remain available on the SNB's data portal.⁶

For the decades before 2007 the published figures are scattered. The economic historian Enrico Berbenni has collected the main markers: eleven banks with about five hundred employees at the end of the Second World War, and forty-four banking institutions with more than seven thousand employees in 1982.⁷ René Chopard's monograph of 1992 on the Ticino banking system and the Swiss financial centre analysed the structure of the market at the end of the boom, but it has not been consulted for this chapter.⁸ The present chapter therefore gives continuous figures only from 2007 onwards and describes the period from 1990 to 2007 in qualitative terms, using the markers that can be verified.

Notes

The point is made for Ticino by Chopard (2009, above), who compares the Ticino system with the Swiss system category by category and notes that the Ticino system is "più internazionale grazie a una forte presenza di banche estere". ↩
BAK Economics, study on the economic importance of the insurance industry in Ticino, prepared for the Associazione Svizzera d'Assicurazioni (ASA/SVV) (Basel, May 2025), https://www.svv.ch/sites/default/files/2025-05/BAK_Economics_ASA_Ticino_2025.pdf. The study also estimates the value added of the Ticino financial sector as a whole; the figures are cited below. ↩
USTAT, 12 Denaro e banche (March 2026, above), tables T. 12.1–T. 12.6. ↩
See, in addition to Chopard (2009, above): René Chopard, "Le possibili risposte della piazza finanziaria ticinese alle dinamiche internazionali", Dati 2 (2011), https://www3.ti.ch/DFE/DR/USTAT/allegati/articolo/212dss_2011-2_10.pdf; René Chopard, "Il sistema bancario ticinese nel 2011", Dati (September 2012), https://www3.ti.ch/DFE/DR/USTAT/allegati/articolo/1835dss_2012-2_14.pdf; René Chopard, "Il sistema bancario ticinese nel 2012: le tendenze in atto", Dati (September 2013), https://www3.ti.ch/DFE/DR/USTAT/allegati/articolo/1964dss_2013-2_3.pdf. ↩
Swiss Bankers Association, Banking Barometer 2026: Economic trends in the Swiss banking industry (Basel, August 2026), https://www.abti.ch/sito/wp-content/uploads/Banking-barometer_2026.pdf. ↩
Swiss National Bank, "Banks in Switzerland" (publication history), https://www.snb.ch/en/the-snb/mandates-goals/statistics/statistics-pub/publication-history/ statpub_bankench ("The Banks in Switzerland report was discontinued in June 2020"). ↩
Enrico Berbenni, "La mobilità territoriale della ricchezza finanziaria. La Lombardia e il confine italo-elvetico (1861–1980)", Archivio Storico Lombardo (2025), 329, https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/aslonline/article/download/30555/26132/95136. ↩
René Chopard, Il sistema bancario ticinese e la piazza finanziaria svizzera (1992). The work is cited in a dossier of the cantonal school service, "Le banche in Ticino", https://www2.sbt.ti.ch/dep/drt/4_banche_in_ticino.pdf. ↩

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.

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Measuring a regional financial centre

Why Lugano is hard to count

The statistical sources

Notes

Setting up or expanding in Switzerland?