The creation of SIX Group and its present form

The merger of 2008

The Swiss market infrastructure of the early 2000s was divided among three companies, all owned by the banks. The SWX Group operated the stock exchange and held the Swiss stake in Eurex. The SIS Group operated the central securities depository and settlement system, SegaInterSettle, together with the clearing house x-clear. Telekurs, the descendant of the Ticker AG of 1930, operated the financial information business and the systems for card payments and interbank clearing. The three companies served the same owners and the same clients. Their separate existence made less and less sense as trading, clearing, settlement and data became parts of one continuous process.

On 1 January 2008 the SWX Group, the SIS Group and the Telekurs Group merged to form Swiss Financial Market Services AG, which was renamed SIX Group Ltd on 21 August 2008.¹ The common brand SIX was introduced in September 2008, when the SWX Swiss Exchange became SIX Swiss Exchange. Earlier, from 1 January 2007, the Swiss exchange and Deutsche Börse had operated a joint exchange for structured products under the name Scoach. The partnership ended in 2013, after which the Swiss business continued as SIX Structured Products.² In 2012 SIX sold its half of Eurex to Deutsche Börse, so that the derivatives market that had grown out of SOFFEX passed entirely under German ownership.³

The timing of the merger was unfortunate and fortunate at once. It was completed in the year of the global financial crisis, when UBS and Credit Suisse, two of the largest owners of SIX, were themselves under severe pressure. The creation of a single infrastructure group, however, gave the Swiss financial centre an operator with the scale to invest in technology at a time when the banks were cutting costs. It also placed the entire chain of trading, clearing, settlement, custody and data under one roof in Zurich, which strengthened the city’s position against Geneva and Basel even further.

Ownership and governance

SIX Group is an unlisted company owned by around 120 Swiss and international financial institutions, which are at the same time its principal users and clients.⁴ The ownership structure is unusual among the large European exchange operators. Deutsche Börse, Euronext and the London Stock Exchange Group are themselves listed companies with a dispersed shareholder base, while SIX remains a user-owned utility of the Swiss banking sector. The structure has two consequences. On the one hand, SIX can take a long view and does not face the quarterly pressure of public shareholders. On the other hand, its owners are also its customers, which creates a permanent tension between the interest in low fees and the interest in dividends. The big banks, and since 2023 UBS alone as the successor to Credit Suisse, carry particular weight in this structure.

The governance of SIX also reflects the Swiss preference for self-regulation. The exchange operates as a licensed stock exchange under federal law, but the rules for issuers and participants are issued by a body within SIX, the Regulatory Board, and enforced by a separate subsidiary, SIX Exchange Regulation AG, as described in section VI below. Critics have occasionally questioned whether a regulator owned by the banks can be sufficiently independent of them. The legislator has answered this question by requiring an independent regulatory body within the exchange and by placing the whole system under the supervision of FINMA.

The businesses of SIX today

SIX describes its activities in four areas: exchange services in Switzerland and Spain, securities services covering clearing, settlement and custody, financial information, and banking and payment services. With SIX Swiss Exchange and the Spanish BME Exchange, it presents itself as the third-largest exchange group in Europe by free-float market capitalisation.⁵ The Swiss exchange is operated by SIX Swiss Exchange AG, while BX Swiss AG, an independent exchange based in Bern, offers a smaller alternative for the listing and trading of shares of small and medium-sized companies.

The post-trade business is carried on by SIX SIS AG, the Swiss central securities depository, which holds and settles Swiss securities and offers custody for foreign securities in more than fifty markets, together with SIX x-clear AG, a central counterparty that clears trades on SIX Swiss Exchange and on other European venues. SIX also operates SIC, the Swiss interbank payment system, on behalf of the Swiss National Bank and is the main supplier of reference and pricing data for Swiss financial instruments.⁶ In 2021 FINMA granted licences to SIX Digital Exchange, which operates a trading venue and a central securities depository for securities issued on a distributed ledger, and which Part J of this book discusses in the context of Zurich’s digital asset market.⁷

The Spanish acquisition and the European strategy

The most important strategic step of SIX since 2008 was the acquisition of Bolsas y Mercados Españoles (BME), the operator of the Spanish stock exchanges. On 11 June 2020 SIX completed the acquisition of 93.16 per cent of the share capital of BME following a public tender offer at EUR 32.98 per share, for a total of about EUR 2.57 billion, equivalent to about CHF 2.75 billion. SIX announced that the combined group would be the third-largest operator of financial market infrastructure in Europe and the tenth-largest in the world by revenue. The acquisition was financed initially through bank guarantees provided by Credit Suisse, UBS and four Spanish banks.⁸ SIX later acquired the remaining shares by squeeze-out.

The BME transaction answered a question that had troubled the Swiss exchange since the failure of virt-x: how a medium-sized operator owned by domestic banks could survive among exchange groups that had grown through mergers into companies with global reach. SIX chose diversification across two home markets, with Spain contributing strength in fixed income, derivatives and indices. The acquisition of Aquis, a London-based operator of multilateral trading facilities in the United Kingdom and the European Union, completed in 2025, extended this strategy to pan-European share trading, the very field in which virt-x had failed twenty years earlier. Zurich remains the seat of the group and the centre of its governance.

Notes

Wikipedia (English), “SIX Group”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIX_Group, consulted for orientation. The article also states that SIX is owned by around 120 Swiss and international financial institutions, that it is not listed on any exchange and that it employed 4,024 full-time equivalents at the end of 2023. ↩
Wikipedia (German), “SIX Swiss Exchange”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIX_Swiss_Exchange. The article also records the move of the head office from the Selnaustrasse to the Pfingstweidstrasse in the Hardturm quarter at the end of June 2017. ↩
Lenz & Staehelin, “Deutsche Börse buys out Eurex from SIX Group”, https://www.lenzstaehelin.com/en/news-events/deals-cases/deutsche-boerse-buys-out-eurex-from-six-group. Deutsche Börse signed the definitive agreement on 7 June 2011 to acquire the 50 per cent stake of SIX in Eurex for EUR 295 million in cash plus an equivalent amount in shares, with completion scheduled for 2012. ↩
SIX Group, “Company”, https://www.six-group.com/en/company.html. ↩
SIX Group, “Company”, https://www.six-group.com/en/company.html. The page also mentions the acquisition of the UK-based Aquis in 2025, which extended the group’s trading activities to 16 markets. ↩
Swiss National Bank, “Financial market infrastructure”, https://www.snb.ch/en/the-snb/mandates-goals/financial-stability/financial-market-infrastructure, stating that SIC is operated on behalf of the SNB by SIX Interbank Clearing Ltd; SIX, “Settlement and custody”, https://www.six-group.com/en/products-services/the-swiss-stock-exchange/post-trade/settlement-and-custody.html, on custody access to over 50 markets; SIX, “Clearing”, https://www.six-group.com/en/products-services/securities-services/clearing.html, on the central counterparty services of SIX x-clear for multiple trading platforms across Europe. ↩
FINMA, “FINMA issues first-ever approval for a stock exchange and a central securities depository for the trading of tokens”, media release, 10 September 2021, https://www.finma.ch/en/news/2021/09/finma-issues-first-ever-approval-for-a-stock-exchange-and-a-central-securities-depository-for-the-trading-of-tokens/. FINMA licensed SIX Digital Exchange AG as a central securities depository and SDX Trading AG as a stock exchange. ↩
SIX Group, media release “SIX Successfully Completes Acquisition of Controlling Stake in BME”, 11 June 2020, https://www.six-group.com/en/newsroom/media-releases/2020/20200611-completion-acquisition-controlling-stake-bme.html. ↩

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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Dr Alexander Ressos, TEP

Rechtsanwalt/Attorney-at-Law

I am a Swiss attorney-at-law and also admitted as a solicitor in Hong Kong and in England & Wales, with almost 25 years of experience.

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