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Method: scenarios, drivers and uncertainties

The scenario tradition

Scenario planning emerged from the strategic thinking of the Cold War. Herman Kahn, first at the RAND Corporation and later at the Hudson Institute, used alternative stories of the future to think through nuclear strategy. His book The Year 2000, written with Anthony J. Wiener and published in 1967, carried the method into the analysis of long-term economic and social change.1 Its transfer into corporate strategy is associated above all with Pierre Wack, who headed the business environment planning division of Royal Dutch/Shell. With Edward (Ted) Newland he developed the approach that allowed Shell’s management to think through a sharp rise in oil prices before the crisis of 1973. Wack described the method in two articles in the Harvard Business Review in 1985, the first of which opened with the observation that few companies were happy with the way they planned for an increasingly fluid and turbulent environment.2 The journalist Art Kleiner later reconstructed how Wack and Newland warned Shell in 1972 and 1973 that the price of oil could rise from about two dollars to ten dollars a barrel. Shell alumni such as Peter Schwartz and Kees van der Heijden then carried the method to other companies and into public policy, including the scenario exercises that accompanied South Africa’s transition from apartheid.3

Two further works define the method as it is practised today. Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View insists that a scenario is no prediction. The book describes a process in which information from a broad range of sources, including the fringes of society, is combined into several contrasting but plausible stories that allow responses to be rehearsed before events force them.4 The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach of Rafael Ramírez and Angela Wilkinson moves the emphasis from forecasting to reframing. Scenarios serve to question the assumptions on which organisations and public bodies base their strategies.5 Common to all these approaches is the distinction between predetermined elements, whose direction can be known with reasonable confidence because they are already under way, and critical uncertainties, which matter greatly and whose outcome cannot be known. The scenarios are built from the second category and constrained by the first.

Swiss strategies and visions

The Swiss authorities have practised this kind of thinking for some time, although they have seldom applied it explicitly to the financial centre. On 19 June 2026 the Federal Chancellery published Perspektiven Schweiz 2040, prepared with experts from the federal administration and academia as a basis for the Federal Council’s legislative planning for 2027–2031. The report works with three scenarios that vary along several dimensions. They range from economic stagnation to recovery, from a critical to a stable security situation, from the neglect of climate change to active climate protection and from a multipolar to a unipolar world order. It then derives six fields of action, among them the technology and knowledge base, economic prosperity and Switzerland’s place in the world. The Chancellery stresses that its scenarios represent neither ideal pictures nor the most probable future, since each contains elements that may be judged positively or negatively.6 This chapter adopts the same understanding.

For the financial centre, the principal statement of federal strategy remains the report on financial market policy that the Federal Council adopted on 4 December 2020 under the title “Weltweit führend, verankert in der Schweiz”, world-leading and anchored in Switzerland. The report combined the traditional strengths of stability, security and trust with openness to new developments such as fintech and sustainable finance. It defined the task of the Confederation as the creation of optimal regulatory and institutional conditions for the competitiveness of the Swiss financial market.7 It continued a series of reports on financial market policy that had begun after the crisis of 2008. A report on digital finance followed in 2022. The annual activity report of the State Secretariat for International Finance (SIF) for 2025 shows how the programme has been carried forward in practice. The Berne Financial Services Agreement with the United Kingdom entered into force on 1 January 2026, while the consultation on stablecoins and crypto institutions opened on 22 October 2025. The Financial Innovation Desk moved into the SIF on 1 September 2025. With effect from 1 May 2025 the European Union was removed from the list of jurisdictions affected by the stock exchange protective measure.8 No new comprehensive report on financial market policy had been adopted by September 2026, as the Federal Council’s attention since 2023 has been absorbed by the reform of the too-big-to-fail regime.

Industry bodies speak in the language of visions. The Swiss Bankers Association states that its aim is to create optimum frameworks for a strong, diverse and innovative Swiss banking sector, a formula that says much about its priorities in the capital debate.9 Civil society has contributed as well. As early as 2014 the foreign policy think tank foraus published a discussion paper on a “Vision Finanzplatz 2030”. Drawing on thirty-seven expert interviews structured around an optimistic and a pessimistic scenario, it envisaged Switzerland as a globally oriented hub for wealth management and cross-border investment.10 Much of what that paper treated as uncertain in 2014, from the end of banking secrecy to the fate of the second big bank, has since been decided, usually in a more dramatic way than its authors foresaw. The lesson for an exercise of this kind is humility about timing and attention to the discontinuities that experts tend to underestimate.

The baseline in 2026

Any scenario starts from a baseline. In the summer of 2026 the Zurich financial centre was, by most measures, stronger than its political anxieties suggested. BAK Economics, in its study for the canton, found that about one franc in six of the region’s value added and one job in ten depended directly on the financial centre. In 2023 it generated a gross value added of about CHF 32.8 billion and employed more than 103,400 people, with banks contributing 43 per cent of the value added, insurers 37 per cent and other financial services 20 per cent.11 The Swiss Bankers Association reported at the end of August 2026 that the assets managed by Swiss banks had passed CHF 10 trillion for the first time, reaching CHF 10,120 billion in the first half of the year. Operating income had risen by 5.8 per cent to CHF 73.8 billion in 2025, while full-time employment had fallen by 2.5 per cent to 92,002 positions, mainly because of the integration of Credit Suisse into UBS.12

The same period brought a symbolic loss. The Global Wealth Report 2026 of the Boston Consulting Group found that Hong Kong had overtaken Switzerland in 2025 as the world’s largest booking centre for cross-border wealth, one year earlier than the consultants had projected. Both centres held about USD 2.9 trillion of cross-border assets, but Hong Kong had grown by 10.7 per cent and Switzerland by 7.6 per cent, with more than sixty per cent of Hong Kong’s assets originating in mainland China. Switzerland remained the central booking centre for Western European, Middle Eastern and Latin American clients.13 The two findings, record assets and the loss of first place, capture the ambivalence from which every scenario for 2035 must begin.

Notes

  1. Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York, 1967). “Herman Kahn”, English Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn, on his work at the RAND Corporation, the founding of the Hudson Institute in 1961 and his standing as “a father of scenario planning”. ↩
  2. Pierre Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead”, Harvard Business Review, September 1985, https://hbr.org/1985/09/scenarios-uncharted-waters-ahead. The companion article, “Scenarios: Shooting the Rapids”, appeared in the November–December 1985 issue; see Wikipedia, “Pierre Wack”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Wack. ↩
  3. Art Kleiner, “The Man Who Saw the Future”, strategy+business, 12 February 2003, https://www.strategy-business.com/article/8220. Kleiner also records the persistent difficulty of translating scenarios into actual strategic decisions. ↩
  4. getAbstract, summary of Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View (Currency edition, 1996), https://www.getabstract.com/en/summary/the-art-of-the-long-view/11771. The book first appeared in 1991. ↩
  5. WorldCat record for Rafael Ramírez and Angela Wilkinson, Strategic Reframing: The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/951230165. ↩
  6. Federal Council, press release on the report Perspektiven Schweiz 2040, 19 June 2026, https://www.admin.ch/de/newnsb/BT5GtKA_-2zhrcGkzYm2l. ↩
  7. Federal Council, press release “Bundesrat beschliesst Weiterentwicklung der Finanzmarktpolitik: Weltweit führend, verankert in der Schweiz”, 4 December 2020, https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilungen.msg-id-81462.html. ↩
  8. State Secretariat for International Finance, Tätigkeitsbericht 2025, https://www.sif.admin.ch/dam/de/sd-web/NLoWaSssFgVh/SIF-T%C3%A4tigkeitsbericht_2025_DE.pdf. The report also records the Federal Council’s decision of June 2025 to pause the revision of the climate reporting rules pending developments in corporate law and in the European Union. ↩
  9. Swiss Bankers Association, “Vision & mission”, https://www.swissbanking.ch/en/about-us/association/vision-and-mission. ↩
  10. Julien Briguet, Dominik Elser, Marc Emmenegger and Kristof Trautwein, Vision Finanzplatz 2030: Für einen global ausgerichteten Schweizer Finanzplatz, foraus Discussion Paper No. 21, February 2014, https://www.foraus.ch/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/foraus-D.P.-Vision_Finanzplatz_2030.pdf. ↩
  11. Kanton Zürich, Amt für Wirtschaft, “Finanzdienstleistungen”, https://www.zh.ch/de/wirtschaft-arbeit/wirtschaftsstandort/finanzdienstleistungen.html, summarising BAK Economics, Finanzplatz Zürich 2025/2026. ↩
  12. Plattform J, “Erstmals 10 Billionen erreicht”, 31 August 2026, https://www.plattformj.ch/artikel/246298/, reporting the Bankenbarometer 2026 of the Swiss Bankers Association. ↩
  13. finews.asia, “Global Wealth Report: Hong Kong Overtakes Switzerland”, May 2026, https://www.finews.asia/finance/44906-global-wealth-report-hong-kong-overtakes-switzerland, on the BCG Global Wealth Report 2026 published on 27 May 2026. ↩

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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