Switzerland has done little more than bare minimum to improve transparency of its financial system

For a global financial centre of Switzerland's scale, meeting the minimum standards for information exchange is not enough to address the risks of money laundering, corruption and tax evasion, say Andres Knobel and Bob Michel of the Tax Justice Network.

Switzerland is again among the top enablers of financial secrecy, ranking second in the 2026 edition of the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index. It is not the largest offshore financial centre catering to non-residents, as measured by the Index’s Global Scale Weight: Switzerland’s value is only 14% of that of the United States.

Nor is it the most secretive jurisdiction in the world. Panama and the United Arab Emirates, for example, perform worse in terms of the strength of their transparency and regulatory frameworks.

Yet Switzerland’s combination of significant financial scale and persistent transparency shortcomings keeps it at the heart of the global financial secrecy system.

The Financial Secrecy IndexExternal link does not suggest that financial secrecy is the reason Switzerland became such a large financial centre. Legal stability, reputation, geography and many other factors have undoubtedly contributed to its success. Regardless of the reason, however, being such a large financial centre entails responsibility. With so much money flowing through Swiss bank accounts, companies, real estate and trustees, the risks of tax evasion, corruption and money laundering are significant.

Yet Switzerland’s transparency framework continues to lag behind that of many of its peers.

Beneath the veneer of compliance with international standards on automatic exchange of information and other OECD initiatives lies a consistent tendency to do the minimum required, but little more. Many EU and OECD countries outperform Switzerland across a range of transparency measures. For a global financial centre of Switzerland’s scale, meeting the minimum standards for information exchange or making beneficial ownership information available only to authorities – while excluding journalists and civil society organisations – is not enough to address the risks of money laundering, corruption and tax evasion.

Administrative assistance in the collection of taxes and the exchange of bank account information are a case in point. The fact that the United States is becoming increasingly attractive to non-residents because of loopholes in the automatic exchange of bank account information under the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), compared with the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)’s Common Reporting Standard (CRS), or that wealth may be shifting to financial centres such as Dubai and Singapore, should be no excuse for Switzerland to lower its ambitions in the field of automatic exchange of information.

Just as European countries bear a responsibility and debt towards the countries and communities in the Global South from which they extracted resources and prosperity through colonialism, Switzerland also bears responsibility for designing and serving as a pivotal actor within the global financial secrecy system that facilitates illicit financial flows and capital flight from Global South countries.

For many lower-income countries, access to tax information can be as valuable as aid because it enables governments to identify undeclared offshore wealth, enforce their tax laws and raise revenue that would otherwise be lost. Switzerland’s most valuable contribution to international development is therefore not only its official development assistance. It is also its ability to share tax information and ensure that Global South countries receive the information they need to enforce their tax laws, reduce their tax gaps and achieve much-needed domestic resource mobilisation.

For Switzerland, this means thinking beyond the constraints of existing exchange of information frameworks and treating tax-information sharing as a form of development assistance.

Today, many of the countries most affected by offshore tax abuse are effectively locked out of the OECD’s system for exchanging financial account information automatically. Under the Common Reporting Standard (CRS)External link, countries receive information only if they are able to provide equivalent information in return. Yet for many Global South countries, implementing CRS is extremely costly. As a result, countries may be denied access to information on Swiss bank accounts held by their residents simply because they lack the resources to participate fully in the system, even where the information Switzerland would receive in return is negligible.

It does not have to be this way.

Nothing in international law prevents Switzerland from sharing information on a non-reciprocal basis. It could annually provide anonymised and aggregated information to low-income countries that currently have no access to information exchange, helping policymakers understand where undeclared offshore wealth is being held.

It could also spontaneously share information on large Swiss bank accounts held by residents of the world’s poorest countries where those countries have signed the Mutual Administrative Assistance Convention (MAAC)External link. And where they have not, Switzerland could establish ad-hoc programmes to support information sharing and tax enforcement. Yet none of these barriers are insurmountable.

Switzerland’s reluctance to go beyond the minimum is not new. It has shaped the country’s approach to international tax cooperation for decades.

Switzerland has fought hard to preserve its banking secrecy, resisting the exchange of information when requests were based on leaked data.

It also sought to prevent the introduction of automatic exchange of information through its Rubik agreementsExternal link, which relied on Switzerland collecting tax revenue from undeclared Swiss accounts in favour of other countries, while keeping the identities of account holders secret.

When those efforts failed, Switzerland used its influence to incorporate restrictions into the OECD’s system for automatic exchange of informationExternal link, including reciprocity requirements that continue to exclude many developing countries today, and the requirement of “speciality” (using information only for tax purposes), which prevents information from being used to tackle money laundering, corruption and other non-tax offences.

In other areas of administrative assistance, Switzerland does the legal and political minimum, but not much more.

Last year’s Financial Secrecy Index examined the extent to which countries use opt-outs under the MAAC, the world’s main treaty on international tax cooperation. Unlike many of its neighbours, Switzerland has chosen not to assist in the collection of foreign tax debts and has opted out of exchanging information on taxes other than income and wealth taxesExternal link. In practice, this means that Switzerland will neither exchange information for the assessment of another country’s inheritance tax nor assist in its collection.

These are not the hallmarks of a country seeking to lead on international tax cooperation. Tax Justice Network research shows that extensive use of these MAAC opt-outs is disproportionately associated with financial secrecy jurisdictions.

The 2026 edition of the Financial Secrecy Index once again finds Switzerland lagging behind many of its peers on financial transparency. Its record on beneficial ownership and real-estate transparency is particularly revealing. Despite being surrounded by the European Union, which has led the way on beneficial ownership transparency for more than a decade, Switzerland has repeatedly fallen behind.

Only on June 12, 2026 did the country announce that its long-awaited beneficial ownership registration framework would enter into force in October 2026. While this represents progress, it also reflects a familiar pattern: Switzerland tends to embrace transparency reforms only after sustained international pressure, and often only to the minimum extent required. Even then, significant loopholes remain. The new framework excludes certain types of legal entities and foreign trusts operating in Switzerland.

It is time for Switzerland to move beyond its dependence on financial secrecy as a competitive advantage.

The country should reassess its role in the global financial system and begin supporting those Global South countries that have borne the greatest costs of offshore secrecy and capital flight. A good place to start would be to support the UN Tax Convention as a vehicle for inclusive and universal international tax cooperation, strengthening beneficial ownership and real-estate transparency, and ensuring that lower-income countries can access administrative assistance and tax information from Switzerland, even where this requires information sharing on a spontaneous or non-reciprocal basis.

Edited by Virginie Mangin/gw