FINMA Opens Consultation on the AMLO-FINMA: What the Proposed Revisions Actually Change

On 12 May 2026, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) opened a public consultation on a partial revision of the FINMA Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance (AMLO-FINMA — in German, the Geldwäschereiverordnung-FINMA or GwV-FINMA). The consultation runs until 9 June 2026, and the revised ordinance is scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2027, in lockstep with revised versions of the Swiss Bankers Association's Code of Conduct (CDB 20) and the rule book of the Swiss Insurance Association's self-regulatory organisation (SRO-SIA). The package is short — eight substantive items in seventeen pages of explanatory report — but it is more consequential than its scope suggests, because it closes the loop on a multi-year programme of Swiss AML reform and lands just before the country's fifth FATF mutual evaluation.

We have read all four consultation documents — the press release, the key points sheet, the draft amending ordinance, and the explanatory report — and what follows is a walk-through of what is actually changing, why, and what financial intermediaries should be doing now.

Overview

1. The legislative chain this revision completes
2. Understanding the ownership and control structure: new Article 9b
3. Embargo measures move from implicit to explicit: new Article 30
4. Correspondent banking: payable-through accounts come under explicit rules
5. Sub-accounts for unnamed clients: new Article 65 paragraph 2 letter d
6. A bookkeeping change for Liechtenstein payments
7. Updated references to recognised self-regulation
8. What the process tells us
9. What this revision is, and is not
10. What we are watching, and what to do now

The legislative chain this revision completes

The Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance-FINMA is the operational layer of Swiss anti-money-laundering regulation. It sets out, for FINMA-supervised financial intermediaries, how the higher-level rules — the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA, Geldwäschereigesetz or GwG) and the Federal Council's Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance (AMLO, Geldwäschereiverordnung or GwV) — are to be implemented in practice. When the higher-level instruments move, the AMLO-FINMA has to follow.

Three moves preceded this consultation. On 26 September 2025, Parliament adopted both the revised AMLA and an entirely new statute, the Federal Act on the Transparency of Legal Entities and the Identification of Beneficial Owners (TJPG, Transparenzgesetz juristische Personen). The TJPG creates a federal register in which legal entities will be required to record their beneficial owners — the natural persons who ultimately own or control them — so that authorities can identify the people behind a corporate structure more reliably than today. The associated Federal Council ordinance (TJPV) went into its own consultation on 15 October 2025, alongside changes to the AMLO. The AMLO-FINMA revision now finishes the cascade. We covered the upstream AMLA and TJPG package in an earlier post; this piece picks up where that one ended.

The second driver is FATF. Switzerland's 2016 mutual evaluation flagged a series of technical-compliance gaps, and the 2023 follow-up confirmed that some of them remained. The Swiss authorities have closed most of those gaps at the statutory level; what remains for FINMA is to make explicit in its ordinance what supervisory practice has already been requiring. The third driver is straightforward codification: where FINMA has been enforcing a position for years, it now writes that position into the text so that financial intermediaries and their auditors can rely on a clear rule rather than an annual-report citation.

Understanding the ownership and control structure: new Article 9b

The largest substantive addition is a new Article 9b, which requires financial intermediaries to be able to understand the ownership and control structure of the contracting party — that is, the legal entity or arrangement they are taking on as a customer. The Swiss financial centre has had two adjacent rules for some time: Article 9a, which requires intermediaries to understand the rationale for using domiciliary companies (typically shell or holding vehicles with no operational substance), and Article 13 paragraph 2 letter h, which extends that understanding to complex structures generally. What it has not had is a single, explicit obligation that covers ownership and control of all corporate forms.

FATF noticed. In its 2023 follow-up report, the assessors flagged this gap under Criterion 10.8 of Recommendation 10 — the customer-due-diligence recommendation — observing that the Swiss framework lacked a general rule of the kind FATF expects. FINMA's response, in essence, is: "we already require this in supervision; here is the text." The 2021 and 2023 FINMA annual reports both stated the supervisory expectation publicly, but a published practice is not the same as a published rule. Article 9b makes the requirement enforceable on its own terms and gives financial intermediaries something concrete to point to when designing customer onboarding files.

The practical implication is twofold. First, files for legal-entity counterparties will need to demonstrate not only that the beneficial owner was identified but that the chain between the contracting party and that beneficial owner — through holding companies, partnerships, foundations, trusts, and any nominee arrangements — has been documented and understood. Second, the rule and the TJPG register will operate together: where the federal beneficial-ownership register provides authoritative data, financial intermediaries will be expected to use it; where the register is incomplete or contradicted by other evidence, they will be expected to resolve the discrepancy.

Embargo measures move from implicit to explicit: new Article 30

The revised AMLA, in its new Articles 1 and 8, expressly brings the prevention of breaches of coercive measures under the Embargo Act (EmbAct, Embargogesetz) into the AML due-diligence framework. The AMLO-FINMA must mirror that change, and does so in two ways.

The first is structural. Title 1 of the ordinance is being reorganised so that Chapter 4 — covering Articles 9a through 29 — is now titled "Measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing", and a new Chapter 5 is titled "Measures to prevent breaches of coercive measures based on the EmbAct". The existing chapter headings of what were Chapters 4 through 8 drop to section headings inside the new Chapter 4. These are purely formal changes, but they signal something real: embargo-compliance organisation is being treated as a peer of AML compliance rather than a subordinate concern.

The second is the new Article 30, which requires financial intermediaries to put in place measures to prevent breaches of EmbAct coercive measures and cross-refers to the organisational provisions of Articles 10, 20, 23, 24, 25, and 26 — the same scaffolding that supports AML compliance, now applied to sanctions. Responsibility for enforcing the embargo regime itself remains with the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO); FINMA's remit is the organisational and supervisory side. In practical terms, the rules an intermediary already runs to identify counterparties, monitor transactions, train staff, and govern compliance need to be extended explicitly to sanctions risk where they are not already. Most large institutions will recognise this as describing what they already do under the heading of risk management; the change matters because it makes that practice a supervisory requirement, with the corresponding enforcement and audit implications.

Correspondent banking: payable-through accounts come under explicit rules

The most consequential single rule for cross-border banking is a new paragraph 5 of Article 37 governing payable-through accounts (also called pass-through or Durchlauf-accounts). A correspondent banking relationship exists when one bank — the correspondent — provides services to another bank — the respondent — including international wire payments, foreign exchange, and accounts. A payable-through account is a particular variant in which clients of the respondent bank are given direct transactional access to the correspondent's account. Because the correspondent does not have a customer relationship with those clients, the structure is a well-known channel for opaque flows.

Switzerland has never explicitly prohibited payable-through accounts, and Swiss practice has not used them; the annex to the AMLO-FINMA (point 4.4) lists "recourse to payable-through accounts" as a money-laundering red flag. That was, however, FATF's grievance. In the 2016 evaluation, the assessors gave Switzerland an insufficient rating on Criterion 13.2 of Recommendation 13 specifically because the absence of an explicit prohibition meant that the rule, in their methodology, did not "exist" — regardless of whether the practice did. The new paragraph 5 implements Criterion 13.2 directly: where a financial intermediary maintains a correspondent relationship with pass-through features, it may execute payments for the respondent's clients only if it has ensured that the respondent will, on request, supply the customer information the intermediary needs to discharge its own due-diligence obligations.

Alongside this, Article 37 paragraph 3 is being tightened. The current text requires additional clarifications about the respondent's AML controls "depending on the circumstances" (je nach Umständen) — a hedge that, in FINMA's view, has produced legal uncertainty. The phrase is being struck. The additional-clarifications obligation will apply without qualification. This is a codification rather than a tightening; FINMA has been enforcing it that way already, and the explanatory report frames the deletion as a legal-certainty measure. For correspondent banks, the consequence is that the documented chain of due-diligence assurances received from respondents — what is asked, what is received, what is updated when, and how it is captured for the supervisor — needs to stand up without the cushion of the old qualifier.

Sub-accounts for unnamed clients: new Article 65 paragraph 2 letter d

Article 65 governs the situations in which financial intermediaries take a written declaration from a contracting party about who the beneficial owner of the assets is. The revision adds a new letter d covering the case in which the contracting party itself maintains sub-accounts (sometimes called pooled or omnibus sub-ledgers) for individual clients of its own. The rule will be that, even in that configuration, the intermediary must always obtain a beneficial-owner declaration from the contracting party. The Article 4 AMLA requirement to identify and verify beneficial owners has always been read to cover this case in FINMA practice; the new letter d removes the room for any other reading. Sub-account structures of this kind concentrate risk in a relationship the intermediary often cannot otherwise see into, and the explanatory report says so explicitly.

A bookkeeping change for Liechtenstein payments

A small but worth-noting cleanup: Article 10 paragraph 3 currently classifies payments to and from Liechtenstein as domestic payments for which the reduced data set is sufficient. The reduced classification became obsolete on 1 July 2020, when the QR-bill format was introduced and the full data set started being transmitted on every cross-border payment between the two countries. The provision is being repealed rather than amended; nothing changes in the payment flow itself.

Updated references to recognised self-regulation

Articles 35 and 42 of the AMLO-FINMA refer through to two pieces of recognised self-regulation — the Swiss Bankers Association's CDB 20, which covers customer identification and beneficial-owner determination for banks and securities firms, and the SRO-SIA rule book for direct life insurance and mortgage lending. Both will be amended to track the new AMLA and ordinance, and both are scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2027 alongside the AMLO-FINMA. The two FINMA articles are being updated so that they point at the new versions. For banks and insurers, the operational impact comes from those revised self-regulation texts rather than from the FINMA cross-references; the references themselves are housekeeping.

What the process tells us

Two procedural choices deserve attention. First, FINMA elected to skip its usual pre-consultation. The explanatory report attributes this to the limited scope of the changes, the narrow discretion available given the upstream legislation, and the desire to close out the FATF-driven items before the next country evaluation. Second, the public consultation period is four weeks rather than the more typical eight; FINMA is using the shortened-consultation path available under Article 10 paragraph 2 of the FINMA Supervision Ordinance, which applies where a revision is "not of large scope" within the meaning of the Consultation Act.

These choices are not unusual for derived ordinances, but they do signal that this consultation is closer to confirmation than co-design. Substantive direction will not change. The window is for industry to surface implementation problems — phrasing, scope edges, transition mechanics — and for FINMA to make targeted adjustments.

What this revision is, and is not

It is also worth saying clearly what this consultation is not. Several recent Swiss AML reforms widen the scope of the regime beyond traditional financial intermediaries — most notably the new advisor coverage being introduced through the revised AMLA and the TJPG/TJPV package. Those reforms are real, and we have written about them separately. The AMLO-FINMA, by construction, regulates the financial intermediaries that FINMA already supervises; it does not extend the perimeter, and this consultation does not change that. Advisors who fall into the new scope under the revised AMLA will be governed by Federal Council rules and, in many cases, by SRO rule books — not directly by the AMLO-FINMA.

What we are watching, and what to do now

We are watching three things over the consultation window. First, whether the industry pushes back on the unqualified version of Article 37 paragraph 3 and gets any of the old "depending on the circumstances" flexibility restored through transitional guidance — we think it will not, but the comments will be informative on what banks find genuinely hard to operationalise. Second, whether Article 9b's interaction with the TJPG register is clarified in the explanatory materials before entry into force — specifically, whether FINMA will issue practice guidance on the evidentiary weight of register data versus parallel diligence. Third, the wording of the Article 30 cross-references in the final ordinance, because the precise list of organisational provisions that get pulled into the embargo chapter determines how much of the existing AML compliance machinery is automatically in scope.

For financial intermediaries, three pieces of work are worth starting now rather than waiting for 1 January 2027. The first is a documented ownership-and-control diagram for every legal-entity counterparty file, complete enough that a supervisor would recognise it as a deliberate Article 9b artefact rather than scattered notes. The second is an explicit sanctions-compliance organisation review against the new Article 30 cross-references, identifying any gaps between the AML control framework and the equivalent embargo controls. The third, for correspondent banks, is a refresh of the documentation chain on payable-through and similar arrangements — what was promised by the respondent, what evidence backs it, when it is updated, and how the file would look on a supervisory request.

Eight months is enough time to do this work properly. It is not enough time to do it twice. If your team is working through any of this and would find it useful to compare notes, write to hello@bollwerk.ai.

Sources: FINMA, "Consultation on the partial revision of the FINMA Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance (AMLO-FINMA)", press release, key points sheet, draft amending ordinance (Änderungserlass) and explanatory report (Erläuterungsbericht), 12 May 2026. References to FATF Recommendation 10, Criterion 10.8 (2023 follow-up) and Recommendation 13, Criterion 13.2 (2016 mutual evaluation, Technical Compliance Annex) are taken from the explanatory report. Cross-references to the upstream Swiss AML reform draw on the revised AMLA and the TJPG, adopted by Parliament on 26 September 2025.