The legal aftermath: Swiss rules on dormant assets today

From self-regulation to legislation

The controversy of the 1990s exposed the absence of any general statutory framework for dormant assets in Swiss law. The first response came from the banks themselves. The guidelines of the Swiss Bankers Association of 1995 obliged member banks to take measures to prevent accounts from becoming dormant, to flag them once contact had been lost and to report them to a central contact office, which was attached to the Swiss Banking Ombudsman. The Ombudsman, an institution founded by the banks on 1 April 1993 to settle disputes between banks and their clients out of court, thus acquired a second function as the central address for anyone searching for assets whose location was unknown.¹ The guidelines were revised several times. Their current version, known as the Narilo guidelines after the German abbreviation for contactless and dormant assets, dates from May 2022.²

The federal legislator took much longer. A consultation draft of 2000 proposed a federal reporting office, an obligation to try to restore contact after eight years of inactivity and the transfer of unclaimed assets to the Confederation after fifty years. It met with strong opposition from banking circles, which preferred self-regulation through the central contact office of the Swiss banks. In 2003 the Federal Department of Finance appointed an expert commission under Luc Thévenoz, professor at the University of Geneva, which reported in June 2004. The commission identified two gaps in the existing framework: no explicit duty existed for financial intermediaries to attempt to restore contact with inactive clients, and no procedure enabled the central collection of information on dormant assets across all intermediaries.³ Its proposals for a comprehensive statute covering all financial intermediaries did not find sufficient support either.

In the end the Federal Council chose a narrower path. On 1 October 2010 it adopted an additional message proposing an amendment to the Banking Act that would allow banks to liquidate dormant assets if no entitled person came forward after prior publication. Because the consultation had produced controversial results, it expressly refrained from introducing new rules of private law on the treatment of dormant assets.⁴ The amendment became Article 37l of the Banking Act, which entered into force together with implementing provisions in the Banking Ordinance on 1 January 2015.⁵

The current regime

The present regime combines the statutory rules on liquidation with the self-regulatory rules on prevention and search. Under the guidelines, a bank treats assets as contactless once it has lost contact with the client and cannot restore it, and as dormant after a further period, in practice ten years after the last contact. The bank must then register the client’s data in the central database operated for the Swiss Banking Ombudsman, provided that the assets exceed CHF 500 or that a safe deposit box is involved.⁶ Anyone who can show a sufficient reason to believe that a deceased or missing person held assets with a Swiss bank may ask the Ombudsman to search the database. Any match is forwarded to the bank concerned, which then deals directly with the entitled person.⁷

Article 37l of the Banking Act adds a final stage. When assets have been dormant for fifty years, which in practice means about sixty years after the last contact, the bank must publish them on an electronic platform with the name, date of birth, nationality and last known place of residence of the client. If no entitled person comes forward within one year of publication, the bank liquidates the assets and transfers the proceeds to the Confederation, whereupon the claims of the entitled persons are extinguished. For assets that had already been dormant for fifty years when the law entered into force, a transitional period of five years applied.⁸ The platform, www.dormantaccounts.ch, is operated by the Swiss Bankers Association on behalf of the banks. The detailed rules on the publication procedure, the exceptions for small amounts and the costs of publication are contained in the Banking Ordinance.⁹ The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA recognised the guidelines of the Swiss Bankers Association as a minimum standard in 2014.¹⁰

The regime in practice

The first publication, in December 2015, listed about 2,600 dormant accounts with a total value of about CHF 44 million. At the time, a specialist in searching for heirs predicted that at least eighty per cent of these millions would end up with the state.¹¹ Later reports confirmed the tendency. According to a report in the Tages-Anzeiger, the Confederation received a total of CHF 14 million in the years 2017 to 2019 and nearly CHF 18 million in the following year, far below an initial estimate that about CHF 600 million might flow to the Confederation over fifteen years.¹² The difference reflects both the success of the platform in reuniting some clients with their assets and the rule that only assets above CHF 500 are published.

The central search function of the Ombudsman has produced steady results. In 2025 the office received 485 new search requests, of which 460 were considered sufficiently substantiated to be carried out. The searches produced 33 matches, which gave the entitled persons access to CHF 12.1 million and the contents of seven safe deposit boxes. Since the introduction of the current search system in 2001, the office has identified 772 contactless or dormant client relationships and made accessible assets of CHF 157.3 million together with the contents of 82 safe deposit boxes.¹³ These figures are modest compared with the sums at stake in the 1990s. They show, however, that the system functions as intended: it is used, it finds assets and it does so without litigation.

Practical consequences for clients and advisers

For the private client adviser in Zurich, the present regime has several practical consequences. Banks are obliged to take measures to prevent contact from being lost. It has become common for them to recommend that clients designate a person of trust whom the bank may contact if the client can no longer be reached. The same rules apply to the heirs of Swiss clients and to foreign clients alike. An heir who suspects that a deceased relative held an account in Switzerland may approach the bank directly if it is known, or the Ombudsman if it is not, and must document both the death and the entitlement to inherit. Experience in cross-border estates shows that the documentation of the entitlement, in particular for heirs in jurisdictions with a different law of succession, is often the most time-consuming part of the process.

The law of 2015 also has a less visible function. By providing a legal basis for the liquidation of dormant assets and for their transfer to the Confederation, it frees banks from the obligation to keep such assets indefinitely and ends the practice, criticised by the Bergier Commission, of letting fees consume dormant balances without any procedure. The publication on a public platform, which would have been unthinkable in the era of absolute banking secrecy, has become an accepted part of the Swiss system. In that sense the regime is a legislative answer to the failures of the post-war decades, adopted almost seventy years after the end of the war.

Notes

1. Swiss Banking Ombudsman, “25 years of the Banking Ombudsman: as relevant as ever”, https://bankingombudsman.ch/en/25-years-of-the-banking-ombudsman-as-relevant-as-ever/, which gives the date of foundation and records that the present search system was introduced in 2001. ↩
2. Deutscher Bundestag, Wissenschaftliche Dienste, “Nachrichtenlose Konten”, WD 7 – 3000 – 052/25, 20 August 2025, https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/1129494/WD-7-052-25.pdf, which refers to the Swiss Bankers Association’s Richtlinien über die Behandlung kontakt- und nachrichtenloser Vermögenswerte bei Schweizer Banken (Narilo-Richtlinien) of 2022 and describes the central database accessible only to the Ombudsman. ↩
3. Eidgenössisches Finanzdepartement, Bericht der Expertenkommission “Bundesgesetz über nachrichtenlose Vermögenswerte” (as above). ↩
4. Swiss Federal Council, press release of 1 October 2010, “Gesetzliche Grundlage für die Liquidation nachrichtenloser Vermögen”, https://www.admin.ch/de/nsb?id=35374. ↩
5. Swiss Bankers Association, “Dormant assets” (as above), which refers to the revision of the Banking Act effective 1 January 2015. ↩
6. Swiss Bankers Association, “Dormant assets” (as above); Deutscher Bundestag, Wissenschaftliche Dienste, WD 7 – 3000 – 052/25 (as above). ↩
7. Swiss Banking Ombudsman, “Search for assets – General information”, https://bankingombudsman.ch/en/search-for-assets/general-information/. ↩
8. Swiss Bankers Association, “Dormant assets” (as above), which describes the ten-year and fifty-year stages, the one-year publication period, the five-year period for older assets and the transfer to the Confederation. ↩
9. Arts. 45–59 of the Banking Ordinance of 30 April 2014 (BankV, SR 952.02), in particular Art. 49 (duty to publish assets dormant for 50 years with a one-year notification period, no publication for assets of at most CHF 500, costs of examining claims) and Art. 59 (liquidation without prior publication), https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/952.02-49-76.html and https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/952.02-59-86.html. ↩
10. FINMA, “FINMA anerkennt Richtlinien zu nachrichtenlosen Vermögenswerten”, 4 December 2014, stating that FINMA recognises the guidelines of the Swiss Bankers Association on dormant assets as a minimum standard with effect from 1 January 2015, https://www.finma.ch/news/2014/12/aktuell-nachrichtenlose-20141204/. ↩
11. swissinfo.ch, “Swiss publish dormant bank account list”, 16 December 2015, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/unclaimed-assets_swiss-publish-dormant-bank-account-list/41843012. The article quotes David Laufer of LMD Search and records that the Ombudsman had recovered CHF 52 million between 2001 and 2014. ↩
12. Tages-Anzeiger, “Der Bund erhält rund 18 Millionen Franken von vergessenen Bankkonten”, https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/der-bund-erhaelt-rund-18-millionen-franken-von-vergessenen-bankkonten-228658757059. The article does not give a date in the text available; from its content it refers to the transfers of 2020. ↩
13. Schweizerischer Bankenombudsman, Jahresbericht 2025, p. 11, https://bankingombudsman.ch/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Jahresbericht-2025-Schweizerischer-Bankenombudsman.pdf. The Ombudsman at the time of the report was Andreas Barfuss. ↩

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.