The architecture of the Swiss regime

Sources of law

The central statute is the Federal Act of 10 October 1997 on Combating Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing, known in German as the Geldwäschereigesetz (GwG) and in English as the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA), classified as SR 955.0.¹ The Act defines its personal scope, sets out the due diligence duties, regulates the reporting duty and the Money Laundering Reporting Office and establishes the supervisory structure. Its criminal provisions punish breaches of the reporting duty and of certain other obligations. The Act has been revised several times since 1997, most importantly by the Federal Act of 12 December 2014 implementing the revised FATF Recommendations, which entered into force in stages in 2015 and 2016, by the amendment of 19 March 2021, which entered into force on 1 January 2023, and by the amendment of 26 September 2025.²

Below the statute stand three layers of ordinances and rules. The Federal Council’s Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance (Geldwäschereiverordnung, GwV, SR 955.01) defines when an activity is carried out professionally and, since October 2026, contains the implementing rules for advisers. FINMA’s own Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance (Geldwäschereiverordnung-FINMA, GwV-FINMA or AMLO-FINMA, SR 955.033.0) specifies the due diligence duties of the financial intermediaries that FINMA supervises directly, such as banks, securities firms, fund management companies, insurers and, since the Financial Institutions Act of 2018, portfolio managers and trustees.³ The third layer is private rule-making recognised by the state. For banks this is the Agreement on the Swiss banks’ code of conduct with regard to the exercise of due diligence (Vereinbarung über die Standesregeln zur Sorgfaltspflicht der Banken), whose current version, the CDB 20, took effect on 1 January 2020. The CDB 20 specifies identification, the establishment of the beneficial owner and the rules on delegation. Its supervisory commission can impose contractual penalties of up to CHF 10 million, which are paid to charitable purposes.⁴

The revised AMLO-FINMA and the CDB 20 were published together on 18 July 2018 and applied from 1 January 2020. The revision lowered the threshold for identification in cash transactions to CHF 15,000, the level required by the FATF, where the CDB had previously used CHF 25,000. It also clarified global risk monitoring for Swiss groups with foreign branches and subsidiaries, tightened the rules on domiciliary companies and complex structures and brought the rules on video and online identification into the code. The account opening rules became stricter as well: missing documents must be obtained within thirty days, after which the account is blocked and the relationship terminated.⁵ The architecture thus reflects the history told in Part F: the banks’ private code of 1977 survives as the most detailed layer of the law, although it now operates within a statutory frame and under the eye of a state supervisor.

The criminal law completes the picture. Article 305bis of the Swiss Criminal Code (SCC) defines money laundering as an act aimed at frustrating the identification of the origin, the tracing or the forfeiture of assets which the offender knows or must assume originate from a felony or from a qualified tax offence. Article 305ter punishes the failure to establish the identity of the beneficial owner with the care required by the circumstances. Its second paragraph grants the right to report suspicions to the Money Laundering Reporting Office. Article 102 SCC makes a company liable for money laundering if it failed to take all reasonable organisational measures required to prevent it. These provisions are discussed in the section on criminal risk below.

Supervisors

Supervision is divided according to the kind of financial intermediary. Banks, securities firms, insurers, fund management companies, managers of collective assets and the other institutions licensed under the financial market laws are supervised directly by FINMA. Portfolio managers and trustees, who have required a FINMA licence since the Financial Institutions Act entered into force on 1 January 2020, are supervised on an ongoing basis by one of the supervisory organisations authorised by FINMA. The supervisory organisation also checks compliance with the AMLA. Part H of this book described the licensing cascade and the transitional period that ended in 2022.⁶

The remaining financial intermediaries of the parabanking sector, including payment service providers, many crypto service providers, currency exchange offices, leasing companies, credit providers and commodity traders acting for clients, must join a self-regulatory organisation (SRO) recognised by FINMA. The SRO issues binding regulations, audits its members and can sanction or exclude them. FINMA supervises the SROs themselves, which in turn supervise their members. It assigns the SROs to risk categories according to their membership and structure and reviews them through on-site visits, bilateral meetings and the analysis of their annual reports.⁷ In September 2026 FINMA’s list showed twelve recognised SROs. Several of them are based in Zurich, including PolyReg, AOOS, the SRO of the Swiss Insurance Association and the SRO of the Swiss Leasing Association. Others include the VQF in Zug, the SRO-Treuhand Suisse in Berne, the Association Romande des Intermédiaires Financiers (ARIF) and SO-FIT in Geneva, the Ticino fiduciaries’ OAD FCT in Lugano and the SRO of the Swiss Bar Association and the Swiss Notaries’ Association in Berne.⁸

The SRO of the Swiss Bar Association and the Swiss Notaries’ Association is of particular interest for Zurich’s legal profession. It has existed since the early years of the AMLA, because lawyers and notaries who manage assets, act as directors of domiciliary companies or hold client funds in escrow outside a pending proceeding have been financial intermediaries since 1998. The reform of 2025 gives this SRO, together with other SROs, a new group of members in the advisers who fall under the Act from October 2026. The division of supervision between a state authority for the large institutions and private organisations for the smaller intermediaries is a Swiss particularity. Its advantages are proximity to practice and a close knowledge of the individual professions. Its weakness, which the FATF noted in 2016, lies in the uneven intensity of supervision and sanctions across the different organisations.

Notes

1. Federal Act of 10 October 1997 on Combating Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (Anti-Money Laundering Act, AMLA), SR 955.0, bilingual consolidated text at droit-bilingue.ch, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/955.0-index.html. ↩
2. State Secretariat for International Finance (SIF), “Geldwäschereibekämpfung”, https://www.sif.admin.ch/de/geldwaeschereigesetz-gwg. The page summarises the revision of 2021 as addressing the recommendations of the FATF evaluation of 2016, including the verification of beneficial owners, the updating of client data, suspicious transaction reporting, the transparency of associations and the control of precious metals trading. ↩
3. Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance of 11 November 2015 (AMLO), SR 955.01, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/955.01-index.html, and FINMA Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance of 3 June 2015 (AMLO-FINMA), SR 955.033.0, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/955.033.0-index.html. ↩
4. Wikipedia (German), “Vereinbarung über die Standesregeln zur Sorgfaltspflicht der Banken”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vereinbarung_%C3%BCber_die_Standesregeln_zur_Sorgfaltspflicht_der_Banken. Cited for orientation. The article describes the nine main sections of the agreement and its scope, which covers banks and securities firms domiciled in Switzerland but not their foreign branches and subsidiaries. ↩
5. GwP, “Teilrevidierte Geldwäschereiverordnung der FINMA & VSB 20”, 20 July 2018, https://www.gwp.ch/de/news/265_2018-07-20_gwv-finma-vsb-20. The note records that FINMA dropped the verification and updating of beneficial owner information from its draft because the statutory basis was unclear, a gap that the legislative revision of 2021 later closed. ↩
6. Pestalozzi Attorneys at Law, Manu Ferro, “Authorisation requirements for portfolio managers”, 1 December 2020, https://pestalozzilaw.com/en/insights/news/legal-insights/authorisation-requirements-portfolio-managers/. The note records that a portfolio manager must first affiliate with a supervisory organisation, whose confirmation is part of the application to FINMA. ↩
7. FINMA, “Supervision of self-regulatory organisations”, https://www.finma.ch/en/supervision/self-regulatory-organisations-sros/. FINMA sends each SRO an assessment letter annually or every two years, depending on its risk category, identifying deficiencies and the corrective measures required. ↩
8. FINMA, “List of self-regulatory organisations (SROs) recognised by FINMA”, https://www.finma.ch/en/~/media/finma/dokumente/bewilligungstraeger/pdf/sro.pdf?la=en, as retrieved on 27 September 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.