Swiss financial regulator significantly more active in 2025

FINMA closes significantly more proceedings in 2025 Keystone-SDA

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) concluded significantly more proceedings against financial institutions and individuals last year.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Once again, it carried out numerous inspections at banks and insurance companies.

The volatile environment intensified in 2025 and led to increased financial and non-financial risks, FINMA announced at its annual media conference on Tuesday. It therefore focussed on the early identification of risks among the parties involved.

Specifically, the authority carried out 113 on-site inspections at banks, 43 at insurance companies and 20 in the area of asset management, with the number being roughly in line with the previous year.

The majority of the inspections were carried out at the larger financial institutions. The focus remained on the major bank UBS, where FINMA carried out a total of 42 on-site inspections.

More enforcement proceedings

The number of enforcement proceedings against financial institutions and natural persons increased significantly. FINMA concluded 55 such proceedings last year after 38 in 2024.

In the proceedings, the “currently very limited legal requirements for active communication” meant FINMA could not communicate to the public. FINMA was also sometimes prevented from communicating by the courts.

The regulator opened around 450 investigations into potentially unauthorised companies and individuals, based on information from the public, authorities and its supervisory activities. It also made over 300 entries on its warning list, warning against potentially unauthorised providers in the financial market. This represents a high point, according to the report.

The supervisory authority further increased its personnel resources last year. The average number of permanent full-time positions in 2025 was 617 compared to 554 in the previous year.

In this context, FINMA refers to the intensified and early supervision of the financial market, but also to new tasks. For example, it has also been supervising around 10,000 insurance intermediaries since 2024. However, the authority assures that the number of staff will remain in the “three-digit range” in the future.

Adapted from German by AI/mga

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]