People, training and the bankers' association

The banking workforce

In 2023 the banks in Ticino employed 5,584 persons, equal to 5,218 full-time equivalents. The big bank accounted for 988 full-time equivalents, the Raiffeisen group for 712, the cantonal bank for 456 and the foreign-controlled banks for about 1,536, with the remainder at stock exchange banks and other institutions.¹ The wider sector of financial and insurance activities employed 12,074 persons in Ticino in 2022, a figure that includes insurance companies, asset managers and other financial intermediaries.² The USTAT analysis of March 2026 adds a demographic observation that will shape the coming decade: about 43 per cent of bank employees in Ticino are older than fifty, so that the baby boom generation will reach retirement age within the next ten to fifteen years.³ The ageing of the workforce has two consequences. It creates a need to recruit and train a new generation of bankers in a canton whose young graduates often leave for Zurich, Geneva or abroad, and it makes the client relationships held by senior relationship managers, many of them built over decades with Italian families, a succession problem for the banks.

Cross-border commuters in the banks

The Ticino labour market is shaped by the cross-border commuters (frontalieri) who live in Italy and work in the canton. In the third quarter of 2025 Ticino counted 79,812 holders of a cross-border commuter permit (G permit), unchanged from a year earlier, against about 410,000 in Switzerland as a whole. Cross-border commuters represented 33.0 per cent of persons employed in the canton in the second quarter of 2025.⁴ The financial sector was long an exception to this pattern, because banks preferred employees resident in Switzerland for reasons of confidentiality and language and because Italian residents employed by Swiss banks were exposed to Italian investigations into capital flight. This has changed. A USTAT study of the cross-border labour market presented in October 2021 showed that the share of cross-border commuters in financial and insurance activities rose from 6.4 per cent in 2008 to 12.3 per cent in 2019, while their total number in Ticino increased by about 20,000, or 43.6 per cent, between 2009 and 2019.⁵ Cross-border commuters have entered the whole economic fabric of the canton, including sectors where they had been underrepresented.

No official statistic breaks down the cross-border commuters in banks by function. Industry observers place most of them in operations, information technology, compliance and back-office functions, with a growing number in client-facing roles.⁶ Their taxation is governed by the agreement between Switzerland and Italy on the taxation of cross-border workers signed in December 2020, which entered into force in 2023 with effect from 1 January 2024 and distinguishes between "old" crossborder workers, who remain under the previous regime, and "new" ones, who are taxed in both States with a credit in Italy. The agreement, its transitional rules and its political background are analysed in Chapter H.I.⁷ For the banks the new regime raises the net cost of hiring Italian residents who live in the border zone and reduces the wage advantage that made cross-border recruitment attractive.

Notes

1. USTAT, 12 Denaro e banche (March 2026, above), T. 12.3. ↩
2. USTAT, Il Ticino in cifre 2025 (above) ("Attività finanziarie e assicurative 12.074", 2022). ↩
3. USTAT, 12 Denaro e banche (March 2026, above) ("circa il 43% dei collaboratori bancari ha più di 50 anni, con la generazione del baby boom che raggiungerà l'età pensionabile nei prossimi 10-15 anni"). ↩
4. Tio.ch, report on cross-border commuters in the third quarter of 2025 (newsblog "Valute e frontiere"), https://www.tio.ch/newsblog/valute-e-frontiere/1883100/ticino-frontalieri-grigioni-bfs-crescita-rallentamento, citing the Federal Statistical Office. ↩
5. USTAT, "Il mercato del lavoro transfrontaliero", presentation of 12 October 2021, https://www3.ti.ch/DFE/DR/USTAT/allegati/multimedia/pr_20211012.pdf. ↩
6. This description reflects statements in the Ticino press and the industry; no source with figures was located for this chapter. ↩
7. Agreement between the Swiss Confederation and the Italian Republic on the taxation of cross-border workers of 23 December 2020, in force since 17 July 2023 and applicable from 1 January 2024. ↩

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.