To strengthen and maintain the competitiveness of Switzerland’s financial sector, and thus by extension its role as a business location, Swiss financial services providers must be well placed at home, participate in growth worldwide, and make the most of the powerful financial infrastructure available to them.
The new legislative package comprising the Financial Services Act (FinSA) and Financial Institutions Act (FinIA) will make a significant contribution to ensuring the exportability of the Swiss financial sector’s products and services. The two acts increase legal certainty by bringing together the existing provisions and establishing a level playing field for competing providers of comparable investment products and financial services. In addition, they bring investor protection up to date and thus present an opportunity for the Swiss financial sector to secure its future.

The entry into force of the FinSA and FinIA on 1 January 2020 fundamentally reshaped the architecture of Switzerland’s financial market legislation. The fund and asset management industry is particularly affected by this because the FinSA and FinIA have brought about sweeping changes to the legislation on collective investment schemes. Under the new horizontal legislation, the primarily sector-based rules set out in the old Collective Investment Schemes Act (CISA) have been split between the FinSA and FinIA. The Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) and the Financial Market Infrastructure Act (FMIA), which are equally relevant for the fund and asset management industry, are also horizontal in nature.