Method and baseline

Why scenarios and not forecasts

A forecast states what will happen. A scenario describes a coherent path that could happen if certain assumptions hold. It is useful precisely because it makes those assumptions visible. Scenario planning entered corporate strategy through the oil industry in the 1970s and has since become a standard instrument of public authorities that must plan under uncertainty, from central banks to spatial planning offices.¹ The Swiss Federal Statistical Office and the Statistical Office of the Canton of Ticino (Ufficio di statistica, USTAT) use the same method for population, publishing high, medium and low scenarios that differ in their assumptions on fertility, life expectancy and migration.² For a financial centre the method is even more appropriate, because the decisive variables include political decisions in Bern, Rome and Brussels, market developments that no one can predict and the strategic choices of a few dozen banks.

The three scenarios in this chapter combine two kinds of input. The first consists of trends that can be measured and extrapolated with some confidence, such as the age structure of the population, the number of banks and their employees, or the number of licensed asset managers. The second consists of uncertain drivers whose direction is open, such as the outcome of the parliamentary debate on capital requirements for UBS, the future of market access to the European Union or the development of tokenised finance. Each scenario takes the measurable trends as common ground and makes a different but internally consistent assumption about the open drivers. The scenarios are then translated into indicators for 2035 and into triggers, meaning observable events that would show in the next few years which path is materializing.

The difficulty of measuring a financial centre

The first obstacle to any projection is the weakness of the data. Lugano is a city and Ticino a canton, but neither appears as a financial centre in the official statistics. Chapter E.I has shown that the Swiss National Bank discontinued its yearbook Banks in Switzerland after the edition for 2019, that banks report assets under management for the institution as a whole and that no official statistic measures assets under management by canton.³ Every statement about the assets "in Lugano" is therefore an estimate. The projections below avoid inventing such a figure for the starting point. They use an index of the assets managed by institutions based in Ticino, set at 100 for 2025, which expresses the direction and approximate magnitude of change without pretending to know the absolute level.

The other indicators come from regular publications. USTAT publishes annual figures on the number of banks, branches and bank employees, on savings deposits and mortgages, and on the non-bank financial sector.⁴ BAK Economics, an economic research institute in Basel, publishes estimates of value added and employment in the financial sector by canton.⁵ The Federal Statistical Office counts cross-border commuters quarterly, and USTAT republishes these figures for Ticino.⁶ FINMA and the supervisory organisations report the number of licensed asset managers and trustees.⁷ Together these series allow a reasonably precise description of where the financial centre stands in 2026 and a verifiable statement of where each scenario would take it.

Notes

On the origins of scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell see Pierre Wack, "Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead", Harvard Business Review 63 (1985), no. 5. ↩
Ufficio di statistica del Cantone Ticino (USTAT), Scenari demografici per il Cantone Ticino e i suoi distretti, 2024–2050 (Giubiasco, April 2025), https://m3.ti.ch/DFE/DR/USTAT/allegati/volume/d_16_documento.pdf, which presents a high, a medium and a low scenario. ↩
See Chapter E.I. 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"; the data remain available on the SNB data portal, https://data.snb.ch). ↩
USTAT, 12 Denaro e banche (Giubiasco, March 2026), https://m3.ti.ch/DFE/DR/USTAT/allegati/prodima/5112_denaro_e_banche.pdf. ↩
BAK Economics, study on the insurance industry and the financial sector in the Canton of Ticino for the Swiss Insurance Association (ASA/SVV), May 2025, https://www.svv.ch/sites/default/files/2025-05/BAK_Economics_ASA_Ticino_2025.pdf. ↩
USTAT, Notiziario statistico 2025-42 (24 November 2025), https://www3.ti.ch/DFE/DR/USTAT/allegati/news/256341ns_2025-42.pdf. ↩
Florian Schwab, "Independent Asset Managers: The Industry Is Growing Again", finews.com, 19 May 2026, https://www.finews.com/news/english-news/72270-unabhaengige-vermoegensverwalter-zunahme-vsv-yearbook-2025-jubilaeum-vivien-jain-jean-pierre-zuber-2. ↩

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 October 2026.

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Method and baseline

Why scenarios and not forecasts

The difficulty of measuring a financial centre

Notes

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