The legacy: ETH Zurich and human capital as a location factor

ETH Zurich today

The school of 1855 with fewer than seventy students has become an institution with about 27,000 students and doctoral candidates. In 2025 it received a federal financial contribution of CHF 1,385 million, total revenue of CHF 2,051 million and third-party funding of CHF 666 million. Some 9,210 new students enrolled in that year, and about 4,000 master's and doctoral degrees are awarded annually.¹ The whole ETH Domain, which includes EPFL in Lausanne and four research institutes, counted 40,627 students and doctoral candidates, 907 professors and 24,910 employees in 2025, with a total federal contribution of CHF 2,682 million.² The international rankings place ETH among the leading universities of the world. The QS World University Rankings for 2026 put it in eighth place globally, the Times Higher Education ranking for the same year in eleventh place, first in Switzerland on both lists. Twenty-two Nobel laureates are associated with the institution.³

The division of costs agreed in 1854 has thus been reversed. The Confederation, which in the 1850s left the buildings to the seat canton because it lacked the means to construct them, now finances an institution whose annual budget is many times larger than the entire federal budget of the early federal state. The city and canton of Zurich, which once bore the heaviest burden, now receive the largest benefit, in the form of employment, purchasing power, tax revenue from well-paid staff and graduates, and the attraction of firms that seek proximity to the institution.

Spin-offs, venture capital and the banks

ETH has become a significant source of new companies. In 2025 it recognised 46 new ventures, of which 24 were spin-offs based on ETH research results and 22 were start-ups founded by members of the university without such a transfer. The companies associated with ETH raised CHF 540 million in 41 financing rounds, an increase of 27 per cent over the previous year, with twelve rounds exceeding CHF 10 million each. The largest were those of Auterion (CHF 103 million), Beekeeper (CHF 34 million) and DeepJudge (CHF 33 million). ETH also runs an accelerator programme supported by UBS, which offers fellows a monthly salary, a project budget and office and laboratory space.⁴ The ETH Board's figures, which use a broader definition, count 70 spin-offs from ETH Zurich within a total of 318 for the ETH Domain.⁵

The support of a large Zurich bank for an ETH accelerator repeats, in contemporary form, the pattern of the nineteenth century. In 1895 the Kreditanstalt led the consortium that joined AEG in founding the Elektrobank to finance the electrical industry. In the 2020s UBS, which absorbed Credit Suisse, the successor of the Kreditanstalt, in 2023, sponsors a programme for the founders of technology companies. In both cases the bank seeks early access to the enterprises that will become its clients. In both cases, too, the technical expertise concentrated around the Polytechnikum is the raw material of the financial transaction. Venture capital, private equity and the growing Zurich market for technology financing are treated in Part J of this book.

Quantitative finance, risk and artificial intelligence

The mathematical tradition described above has acquired a direct financial application. In 2003 ETH and the University of Zurich launched a joint programme in quantitative finance, initially as a Master of Advanced Studies and from 1 September 2009 as a specialised Master of Science. The programme was a collaboration between the ETH Department of Mathematics and the Department of Banking and Finance of the University of Zurich. By its twentieth anniversary in November 2023 it had produced 444 graduates, most of whom work in banks and financial services companies. In 2023 it was ranked first in Europe by a specialised guide to quantitative finance programmes.⁶ The cooperation of the two Zurich institutions in this field recalls the joint appointments of the nineteenth century, when professors such as Böhmert taught at both.

Artificial intelligence is the latest field in which ETH has become a location factor. The ETH AI Center serves as the central hub for research in artificial intelligence across the university's departments. It participates in the Swiss AI Initiative and in the development of Apertus, an open multilingual language model.⁷ International technology companies have followed the talent. As early as 2017 Google described its Zurich office as its largest development centre outside the United States, with more than 2,000 employees from 75 countries. In the same announcement the company referred to its partnerships with ETH Zurich and EPFL in science and technology education.⁸ For the financial centre, the presence of such firms has a double effect. It increases the supply of engineers and data scientists in the city and at the same time increases the competition for them, with salaries that banks and insurers must match.

Human capital as a location factor for the financial centre

The practitioner's view of the Zurich financial centre in 2026 is shaped by developments that lie outside the scope of this chapter, above all the end of Credit Suisse in 2023 and the transformation of private banking under the pressure of transparency and digitalisation. Against that background the institutions described here have gained in relative importance. A financial centre that can no longer rely on banking secrecy for its competitive advantage must compete on the quality of its services, which depends on the quality of its people. The risk models of Zurich's insurers and reinsurers, the trading systems of its banks, the compliance and sanctions-screening tools that have become indispensable since the tightening of international sanctions regimes, together with the technology behind the tokenisation of assets, all require engineers and mathematicians of the kind that ETH has trained since 1855.

In the author's experience of advising financial institutions and technology companies in Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong, the question of talent is regularly among the first that international clients ask when they consider Zurich as a location. Singapore and Hong Kong have invested heavily in their own universities over the past three decades and can point to rising positions in the international rankings. Zurich's advantage lies in the depth and age of its tradition. Its engineering and mathematical culture has been embedded in the local economy for more than a century and a half, with ties between the university, industry and finance that run through families, alumni associations and boards of directors.

A comparison with Geneva, the subject of the companion volume, makes the point clearer. Geneva has a distinguished university and some of the world's most important international organisations and research institutions, but the federal institute of technology of French-speaking Switzerland was established in Lausanne. Its predecessor, the private École spéciale de Lausanne founded in 1853, became part of the cantonal academy and university before the Confederation took it over in 1969.⁹ Geneva's financial centre, with its emphasis on private banking, commodity trading and international wealth management, has developed in close connection with legal and diplomatic expertise. Zurich's has developed in close connection with engineering and mathematics. The difference goes back, in part, to the decision of February 1854 that placed the only federal school of technology of the nineteenth century in Zurich.

Notes

ETH Zurich, “ETH Zurich bolsters Switzerland as an innovation hub”, ETH News, 16 April 2026, https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2026/04/eth-zurich-bolsters-switzerland-as-an-innovation-hub.html. ↩
ETH Board, Annual Report of the ETH Board on the ETH Domain 2025, March 2026, https://ethrat.ch/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ETHR_Geschaeftsbericht_2025_EN_web.pdf. ↩
Wikipedia, “ETH Zurich”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich, cited for orientation. The article gives 26,942 students for 2025, of whom 4,266 were doctoral students. ETH itself also counts 22 Nobel laureates associated with it: ETH Zurich, “History”, https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/portrait/history.html. ↩
ETH Zurich, “More companies founded, new regulations, new accelerator”, ETH News, 25 February 2026, https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2026/02/mm-more-new-companies-founded-new-regulations-new-accelerator.html. ↩
ETH Board, Annual Report of the ETH Board on the ETH Domain 2025, https://ethrat.ch/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ETHR_Geschaeftsbericht_2025_EN_web.pdf. The difference from the ETH Zurich figure reflects the different reporting categories. ↩
ETH Zurich, Department of Mathematics, “20 Years Quantitative Finance UZH ETH”, D-MATH News, December 2023, https://math.ethz.ch/news-and-events/news/d-math-news/2023/12/twenty-years-quantitative-finance.html. ↩
Wikipedia, “ETH Zurich”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich. Cited for orientation. The article describes the ETH AI Center as bringing together some 1,500 researchers across 16 departments. ↩
Patrick Warnking, “Zurich calling – Expanding our European tech hub”, Google blog, 17 January 2017, https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/zurich-expanding-our-european-tech-hub/. ↩
Peter Fleer and Hans Werner Tobler, “Eidgenössische Technische Hochschulen (ETH)”, HLS, version of 27 November 2012, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010419/. ↩

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

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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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