Two financial centres today: contrast and common ground

Zurich: institutions, insurance and capital markets

The Zurich financial centre of 2026 is the largest in Switzerland by a wide margin. According to the study Finanzplatz Zürich 2025/2026, prepared by BAK Economics for the cantonal office for economic development, more than 103,400 people worked in the regional financial sector in 2023, roughly one employee in ten. The sector generated a gross value added of CHF 32.8 billion, with about one franc in six of the region’s value added depending directly on it. Banks accounted for 43 per cent of that value added, insurance for 37 per cent and other financial services for 20 per cent.¹ The high share of insurance is a distinctive feature: Zurich is the seat of the Zurich Insurance Group, Swiss Re and Swiss Life, three of the institutions whose origins in the nineteenth century were described in the previous section. The Swiss stock exchange, operated by SIX, has its seat in Zurich. Created on 17 May 1995 by the merger of the exchanges of Basel, Geneva and Zurich into the Swiss Exchange SWX, it became between December 1995 and August 1996 the first exchange in the world to move entirely to electronic trading.²

Zurich is also the seat of UBS, which since June 2023 has absorbed Credit Suisse, the bank Alfred Escher founded in 1856. On 19 March 2023 the Federal Council, the Swiss National Bank and FINMA announced the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, supported by a federal guarantee for up to CHF 100 billion of additional liquidity assistance from the SNB and a loss guarantee of CHF 9 billion. After the merger was legally completed on 12 June 2023, the guarantees were terminated by August 2023 without loss to the Confederation.³ The legislative consequences are still being worked out at the time of writing. The Federal Council adopted a dispatch on the revision of the Banking Act in April 2026, requiring full CET1 capital backing of foreign participations, and opened a further consultation in August 2026 on amendments to the Banking Act and the Liquidity Ordinance.⁴ The disappearance of one of the two large Zurich banks is, in the long perspective of this book, the end of the institutional line that began with the railway finance of the 1850s.

Geneva: private wealth, commodities and international organisations

The Genevan financial centre presents a different profile. The Fondation Genève Place Financière states that some 80 banks and around 38,000 people work in the financial sector of the canton and that the sector accounts for 12.9 per cent of cantonal GDP.⁵ The official history of the city of Geneva describes Geneva as the second financial centre in Switzerland and claims that it manages more than half of the foreign capital invested in Switzerland and a substantial share of global offshore private wealth. The same source states that more than 500 trading companies are based or represented in the city.⁶ Wealth management for international private clients, carried on by private banks and by the Genevan offices of Swiss and foreign groups, remains the core of the centre.

Commodity trading and its financing form the second pillar, which has no equivalent in Zurich on the same scale. The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs states that more than 900 commodity trading companies operate in Switzerland, employing about 10,000 people, that more than a third of global trade in crude oil is handled by traders based in Switzerland, and that the leading hubs are Geneva, Zug and Lugano. According to the same source, the sector’s contribution grew from CHF 2 billion in 2002 to more than CHF 80 billion in 2022.⁷ Trade finance, the financing of shipments of oil, metals, grain, sugar and coffee, draws on skills that the Genevan merchants of the sixteenth century would have recognised: the assessment of counterparties in distant markets, the management of currency and shipping risk, and the use of documentary credit.

The third element is Genève internationale. According to the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations Office in Geneva, the Lake Geneva region hosts 45 international organisations, the permanent representations of 185 states, some 750 non-governmental organisations and about 33,000 international civil servants, diplomats and representatives of civil society, as well as more than 6,000 conferences a year.⁸ The international organisations, though they lie outside the financial sector, give the Genevan financial centre a clientele of international officials, a concentration of foundations and philanthropic organisations, and an orientation towards questions of sustainability, development finance and humanitarian funding that shapes its self-image. The Mission dates the beginning of that international tradition to 1863, the year of the foundation of the Red Cross, which is also the year of the foundation of Swiss Re in Zurich. The coincidence is symbolic: in the same year Geneva founded an international humanitarian movement and Zurich an institution for the pooling of catastrophic risk.

What the two centres share

The differences should not obscure what the two centres share, which is considerable. Both are governed by the same federal law: the Banking Act, the Financial Institutions Act, the Financial Services Act, the Financial Market Infrastructure Act, the Anti-Money Laundering Act and the Insurance Supervision Act, all of which Part D of this book examines. Both are supervised by the same authority. FINMA began operations on 1 January 2009 as the successor to three earlier supervisory authorities. Based in Bern, it supervises banks, insurers, securities firms, asset managers and collective investment schemes throughout the country, with a mandate to protect creditors, investors and policyholders and to maintain the proper functioning of the financial markets.⁹ Both depend on the Swiss franc, the Swiss National Bank and the stability of the Swiss political system. Both draw on the same reputation, built over centuries, for discretion, reliability and conservatism, and have been exposed to the same reputational crises.

The two centres also increasingly overlap. Zurich hosts a large private banking and wealth management sector, including independent private banks and the wealth management divisions of the large banks. Geneva hosts branches of the large Zurich institutions, while its own private banks have become groups with offices in many countries. Lawyers, fiduciaries and trust companies work in both cities for the same international clients. For international clients, including clients from Asia, the choice between Zurich and Geneva is often made on grounds of language, personal relationships and the location of a trusted adviser, and much less often on grounds of regulatory difference, since there is none. Although the history traced in this chapter explains why the two cities have different centres of gravity, in daily practice they form parts of one Swiss market.

The chapter’s historical argument has a practical corollary. Switzerland’s financial centre has never been a single place. It has been, from the sixteenth century, a federation of cities with different traditions, languages and networks, bound together by a common constitutional framework and, since the Reformation, by a shared Reformed culture of discipline and accountability. Basel, Lugano and Zug, which lie outside the scope of this chapter, add further dimensions. The strength of the Swiss financial centre lies to a large degree in that plurality: it can offer institutional finance and private wealth management, capital markets and commodity finance, German-speaking and French-speaking expertise, within one legal order.

Notes

1. Kanton Zürich, Amt für Wirtschaft, “Finanzdienstleistungen”, https://www.zh.ch/de/wirtschaft-arbeit/wirtschaftsstandort/finanzdienstleistungen.html, summarising BAK Economics, Finanzplatz Zürich 2025/2026. ↩
2. SIX Group, “30 years at a glance”, https://www.six-group.com/en/site/smi-30years/time-journey.html. ↩
3. Swiss Federal Department of Finance, “UBS takeover of Credit Suisse”, https://www.efd.admin.ch/en/credit-suisse-en; FINMA, “Completion of large banks merger brings clarity and stability”, press release of 12 June 2023, https://www.finma.ch/en/news/2023/06/20230612-mm-vollzug-zusammenschluss-ubs-cs/. ↩
4. Swiss Federal Department of Finance, “UBS takeover of Credit Suisse” (as above), section on subsequent legislative developments. ↩
5. Fondation Genève Place Financière, “La Place Financière de Genève”, https://www.geneve-finance.ch/fr-ch/la-place-financiere. The page does not state the reference year of these figures. ↩
6. Ville de Genève, “Genève, place financière” (as above). ↩
7. Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, “Commodities trading”, aboutswitzerland, https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/commodities-trading. ↩
8. Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations Office and other international organisations in Geneva, “Facts and figures about International Geneva”, https://www.mission-geneve.dfae.admin.ch/en/facts-and-figures-about-international-geneva. ↩
9. FINMA, “FINMA – an overview”, https://www.finma.ch/en/finma/finma-an-overview/. ↩

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.