Switzerland's AML Framework Catches Up With Its Gatekeepers

On 26 September 2025, after years of consultation and a substantive parliamentary rework, the Swiss Federal Assembly adopted two laws that together represent the most consequential change to Switzerland's anti-money-laundering regime in a generation. The first is the Bundesgesetz über die Transparenz juristischer Personen und die Identifikation der wirtschaftlich berechtigten Personen — the Transparency of Legal Entities Act, abbreviated TJPG in German or LETA in English — which creates a federal beneficial-ownership register. The second is a partial revision of the Geldwäschereigesetz (GwG), the Anti-Money Laundering Act, which extends Switzerland's AML perimeter to a defined set of professional advisors for the first time. The referendum deadline expired on 15 January 2026 without challenge, and the Federal Council is now expected to bring both texts into force in the second half of 2026, in time for Switzerland's next Financial Action Task Force (FATF) country evaluation scheduled for 2027/2028. The implementing ordinances — the TJPV for the register, and consequential amendments to the GwV for the AMLA changes — went into consultation on 15 October 2025 and the consultation closed on 30 January 2026. We expect the final ordinances before mid-2026.

We want to set out, in some detail, what is changing, why it is changing, and where the practical consequences will land. The headline narrative — "Switzerland is finally regulating its lawyers" — is partly right and substantially misleading. The reform is narrower than the international press has framed it and broader than the legal community had hoped during the legislative process. The detail matters.

Overview

1. Why this is happening
2. The Transparency Register: what it captures, who can see it
3. The advisor question: what the new GwG actually does
4. Supervision through SROs
5. Sanctions and what changes operationally
6. Where this leaves the Swiss market
7. How we read this

Why this is happening

The reform is driven by Switzerland's standing with the FATF, the inter-governmental body whose recommendations are the global reference standard for AML and counter-terrorist-financing supervision. In its 2016 mutual evaluation of Switzerland, the FATF rated the country only "partially compliant" with Recommendations 22 and 23 — the recommendations that require designated non-financial businesses and professions (lawyers, notaries, accountants, real-estate agents, trust and company service providers) to be subject to customer due diligence and suspicious-activity reporting where they perform certain high-risk transactions for clients. Recommendation 28, which requires effective supervision of those professions, was rated "largely compliant." Switzerland was placed in the FATF's "enhanced follow-up" process, which is the procedural antechamber to the grey list. The 2024 Botschaft (the Federal Council's explanatory message to Parliament, BBl 2024 1607) is candid about this: it identifies the gap between the Swiss perimeter and the FATF perimeter, surveys how France, Germany, the UK and others have closed it, and proposes a Swiss answer that is recognisably Continental European but with a self-regulatory bias.

The reform also sits against a domestic risk picture. The federal inter-departmental coordination group on combating money laundering and terrorist financing (KGGT) published reports in 2017 and 2021 documenting the role of Swiss legal entities — particularly shell structures and non-operational holding vehicles — in laundering cases, both domestic and international. The new framework is a deliberate response to those findings rather than a generic FATF compliance exercise.

The Transparency Register: what it captures, who can see it

The TJPG establishes a central electronic register of beneficial owners, maintained by the Federal Office of Justice within the Federal Department of Justice and Police (EJPD). A separate control unit at the Federal Department of Finance (EFD) is tasked with checking the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of the entries.

The definition of beneficial owner follows the FATF standard. Under Article 4 of the TJPG, a beneficial owner is any natural person who ultimately controls a legal entity by directly or indirectly holding — alone or by coordinated action with others — at least 25 per cent of the capital or the voting rights, or who otherwise exercises control. Where no person meets the 25-per-cent test, the most senior member of the governing body is recorded as the beneficial owner on a subsidiary basis. The register captures Swiss private-law legal entities, certain foreign legal entities with a sufficient nexus to Switzerland (a Swiss branch, or ownership of Swiss real estate), and trusts whose effective administration takes place in Switzerland. SICAVs — open-ended investment companies with variable capital — have their own variant of the definition (Article 5), keyed to the entrepreneur shareholders' sub-fund. There are carve-outs in Article 3 for listed companies and subsidiaries that are more than 75-per-cent held by listed groups, for occupational pension institutions supervised under the BVG, and for legal entities that are at least 75 per cent owned by public bodies.

Access is one of the most carefully negotiated parts of the law. Public access — which the EU has moved toward and partially retreated from after the Court of Justice's WM and Sovim judgment — was explicitly rejected by the Swiss Parliament. Access is limited to designated authorities (criminal prosecutors, tax authorities, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO, the Money Laundering Reporting Office MROS, intelligence services) and to financial intermediaries and other persons subject to the GwG, who may consult the register to the extent necessary to discharge their own due-diligence obligations. Self-regulatory organisations (SROs) and the AMLA supervisory authorities have online access; deleted historical data is available only on justified request.

For entities in scope, the practical reality is straightforward: identify the beneficial owners, report them to the federal register, and update the entry when control changes. The implementing ordinance, currently in consultation, will fix the precise reporting cadence; market commentary points to a one-month deadline for initial registration and for updates. Sanctions include fines and, in serious cases, suspension of certain registration rights.

The advisor question: what the new GwG actually does

The more contested half of the package is the extension of AML obligations to "advisors" (Beraterinnen und Berater). The original Federal Council proposal cast a wide net. Parliament — after sustained advocacy from the Swiss Bar Federation (SAV/FSA), the audit and trustee professions, and the real-estate industry association SVIT — narrowed and conditioned the scope. The result, codified in the revised Article 2 of the GwG, is targeted rather than sweeping.

The new Article 2 paragraph 1 letter c of the GwG brings advisors into the personal scope of the Act. Article 2 paragraph 3bis defines them. Advisors are lawyers, notaries, and other persons offering legal or accounting advice, who professionally assist a client in planning or executing a transaction in any of five defined categories:

• the sale or purchase of real estate;
• the founding or establishment of a company, foundation, or trust;
• the management or administration of a company, foundation, or trust;
• the organisation of fundraising for a company;
• the sale or purchase of a company.

Three qualifications materially shape this list. First, the activity must be performed berufsmässig — professionally, meaning a self-employed economic activity directed at a continuing source of income, whether principal or ancillary. The ordinance will set quantitative de-minimis thresholds keyed to the number of mandates and the values involved, so genuinely incidental engagements drop out. Second, Parliament added a requirement, absent from the Federal Council's draft, that the advisor assist the client with a financial transaction connected to the listed operation. Pure structuring advice that does not involve the advisor in actual fund flows — drafting articles of association, providing a legal opinion on a corporate reorganisation — is, on a literal reading, outside scope. The exact boundary will be tested in practice and clarified in the ordinance. Third, for the entity-related triggers, the relevant legal entity must be non-operational: setting up an active trading business does not trigger the AML perimeter; setting up a holding vehicle with no operational activity does.

Litigation work is excluded outright. Representation and advice by lawyers and notaries in connection with court or administrative proceedings is carved out from the GwG, in line with the position taken by the Federal Supreme Court on legal professional privilege and confirmed in the legal opinion the Federal Council commissioned from Professor Chappuis. Privilege also shapes the reporting regime: where a covered advisor forms a suspicion of money laundering or qualified tax fraud in the context of an advisory mandate that falls within the protected sphere of the profession, the reporting obligation to MROS is qualified. The SROs' inspection powers over lawyers and notaries are similarly drawn to preserve privilege.

Supervision through SROs

The supervision architecture is the most distinctively Swiss element of the reform. Rather than placing advisors directly under FINMA, the Federal Council and Parliament extended the existing self-regulatory organisation model that has supervised the parabanking sector since 1997. Advisors in scope must join a FINMA-recognised SRO. The SRO sets the implementing rules within the framework of the GwG, conducts inspections, applies disciplinary sanctions, and reports systemic concerns to FINMA. New SROs are emerging to serve specific professional segments — for example SVIT, the Swiss real-estate association, is preparing an SRO admission process for in-scope real-estate advisors, with material guidance dating from early 2026.

The Federal Council's reasoning, set out in section 4.1.2.1 of the Botschaft, is that the heterogeneity of the affected professions — lawyers, notaries, trustees, tax advisors, free professionals — makes a single direct-supervision regime impractical, and that the SRO model lets supervisory rules be tailored to the texture of each profession without compromising substantive obligations.

Sanctions and what changes operationally

The substantive duties imposed on covered advisors are familiar from the financial-intermediary regime: identify the contracting party; identify the beneficial owner of the assets and structures involved; clarify the economic background and purpose of the transaction; document; report suspicions to MROS subject to the privilege carve-out. The procedural intensity is calibrated to the risk class of the mandate.

Sanctions are meaningful. Intentional breach of the reporting duty under the revised GwG can be punished with a fine of up to CHF 500,000; negligent breach attracts a lower but still material fine. Breach of due-diligence duties carries administrative consequences imposed by the SRO and, in serious cases, can lead to exclusion from the SRO — which, since membership is the licence to perform in-scope activities, effectively means losing the right to do that work.

Where this leaves the Swiss market

For Swiss legal entities, the operational implications are mostly upstream administrative work: identify beneficial owners against the 25-per-cent test, file the register entry within the statutory window, keep it current, and assume that financial intermediaries servicing the entity will routinely cross-check against the register. The harder cases will be foreign structures with Swiss nexus, complex shareholder arrangements held through nominees or trusts, and groups where control runs through coordinated-action arrangements rather than capital. The detailed indirect-control rules will come in the implementing ordinance under the rule-making authority of Article 6 of the TJPG.

For Swiss lawyers, notaries, accountants and trustees, the practical task is harder and more interesting. Each firm will need to map its mandates against the five trigger categories in Article 2 paragraph 3bis of the revised GwG, identify which engagements involve assistance with a financial transaction, separate operational from non-operational entities, and decide which SRO to join. Firms that handle even occasional non-operational structuring work — Swiss holding companies, family wealth vehicles, real-estate transactions for non-resident clients — will likely fall in scope and need an AML compliance function with the discipline that financial intermediaries have built over the past two decades. Firms that operate exclusively in court representation, regulatory advisory, or transactional advice without financial-flow involvement may stay out of scope, but the line is genuinely fact-specific and getting it wrong is expensive.

For financial intermediaries — Swiss banks, asset managers, fiduciaries — the most immediate change is the register itself. From entry into force, the BO register becomes a credible primary source for one of the most error-prone parts of customer due diligence. We expect onboarding and periodic-review workflows to incorporate register lookups, and we expect FINMA and the SROs to update the CDB (the Vereinbarung über die Standesregeln zur Sorgfaltspflicht der Banken, currently CDB 20) and related self-regulation to reflect that fact.

How we read this

Two things are worth saying plainly. First, this is a real reform, not cosmetic. The combination of a federal beneficial-ownership register and a defined AML perimeter for advisors removes Switzerland's main residual deviation from the FATF standard, and it does so by drawing on Swiss institutional traditions — SRO supervision, restricted register access, sectoral self-regulation — rather than copying the European Union's architecture wholesale. The Federal Council was explicit that the goal was a credible Swiss answer, evaluable at the 2027/2028 FATF round, not a transposition exercise.

Second, the legislative compromise — particularly the non-operational entity qualifier, the financial transaction condition, and the litigation carve-out — leaves real interpretive space. Some commentators read these qualifiers as narrowing the scope so much that pure advisory work escapes the regime; others read them as Parliament restating the FATF perimeter in Continental terms. We think the truer reading is that the law forces case-by-case classification, which is exactly what AML supervision elsewhere has converged on. The ordinances, the first SRO rulebooks, and the early FINMA practice will set the operating norms over the next eighteen months.

For our clients and partners working with Swiss legal entities or Swiss advisors, the practical message is: do the mapping work now, before the implementing ordinances are final. The shape of the regime is settled; the granular thresholds will follow. The firms that will navigate this well are the ones treating the second half of 2026 as the deadline that it is, rather than the optimistic date that it might still slip from. If your team is working through any of this and would find it useful to compare notes, write to hello@bollwerk.ai.

Sources: Federal Council message of 22 May 2024 (BBl 2024 1607); adopted texts BBl 2025 2899 (revised GwG) and BBl 2025 2900 (TJPG); State Secretariat for International Finance (SIF) information page on the AML revision; Federal Chancellery referendum chronology (referendum deadline 15 January 2026); Federal Council press release of 15 October 2025 opening the consultation on the implementing ordinances. The FATF Switzerland country report (2016) and the KGGT national risk assessments (2017, 2021) provide the underlying risk context.