Swiss Banking Secrecy Was Never Repealed

Swiss banking secrecy has not been repealed.

Article 47 of the Federal Act on Banks and Savings Banks of 8 November 1934 still punishes with up to three years or a monetary penalty anyone who intentionally discloses a secret entrusted to him as an officer, employee, agent or liquidator of a bank, or who attempts to induce such a breach. Where the offender obtains a financial advantage the ceiling is five years. Negligent disclosure carries a fine of up to 250,000 francs, and paragraph 4 keeps the offence alive after the employment ends.

What ended was not the rule but a claim made about it by people who had not read paragraph 5, which reserves the federal and cantonal provisions on the duty to testify and to give information to an authority. Article 47 binds a bank against private parties. It was never a shield against a state exercising a power the law gives it. The proposition sold for forty years and mourned for ten was, in strict terms, never enacted.

The exchange, with its dates

The legal basis for the automatic exchange of information in tax matters entered into force in Switzerland on 1 January 2017. Data were collected from that year and the first exchange took place in 2018. The Federal Tax Administration's published account of an exchange round gives the scale: 101 partner countries, around 3.4 million financial accounts reported out, around 2.9 million reported in, and around 9,000 reporting Swiss financial institutions registered with it.

The perimeter is still moving, and not in one direction. On 26 November 2025 the Federal Council brought the amended Act and Ordinance into force for 1 January 2026, extending the standard to associations and foundations subject to conditions, and determined at the same meeting that the provisions on crypto-assets would not apply in 2026. That divergence is the subject of The Register and the Deletion. The Swiss point is narrower: the redoubt of confidentiality now files more than three million account records a year and publishes the count.

So the question is not what a principal has lost. It is what is left, and whether that was ever what was being bought.

What is actually for sale

The answer is enforceability, and it is indifferent to who holds it.

Article 271 of the Federal Act on Debt Enforcement and Bankruptcy of 11 April 1889 allows a creditor to request that assets of a debtor located in Switzerland be attached, for a debt due and not secured by a pledge, on six exhaustive grounds. Two matter to a cross-border reader. Number 4 covers a debtor who does not reside in Switzerland, where no other ground exists but the claim has a sufficient connection to Switzerland or rests on an acknowledgement of debt. Number 6, inserted by the Federal Decree of 11 December 2009 implementing the revised Lugano Convention and in force since 1 January 2011, covers a creditor holding a court judgment or its equivalent, and paragraph 3 has the same court rule on enforceability where the Convention applies.

Article 272 sets the threshold. The court authorises the attachment where the creditor credibly demonstrates that the claim exists, that a ground exists, and that there are assets belonging to the debtor. Not proves. Demonstrates credibly. Article 278 gives any person whose rights are affected ten days to oppose, and provides that neither opposition nor appeal compromises the attachment's effect. Article 273 makes the creditor liable for loss arising from an unjustified one.

Set that beside London Is a Procedure, Not a Place and the difference is one of object. The English instrument acts on a person the court can reach and follows assets anywhere; the Swiss instrument acts on assets in Switzerland and is indifferent to where the person is. A file assembled for one is not a file for the other, and the gates still standing between attachment and recovery are set out in Tracing Is Not Recovery.

The uncomfortable half is the symmetry. A standard that admits a creditor on a credible showing admits every creditor on the same showing, including the one across the table from a client resident in the canton. Predictability is not protection. It is one rule applied to whoever reaches the court first.

Administration without authorship

Switzerland has no domestic trust. It recognises trusts under the Hague Convention of 1 July 1985, in force for Switzerland since 1 July 2007 by the Federal Decree of 20 December 2006, which inserted Chapter 9a into the Private International Law Act and a dedicated title into the debt enforcement statute: article 284a directs enforcement for a trust debt against a trustee as representative and limits the resulting bankruptcy to the trust assets, and article 284b segregates trust assets from a bankrupt trustee's estate.

This was a choice, reaffirmed recently. On 15 September 2023 the Federal Council took note of the consultation results on introducing a trust into the Code of Obligations, declined to prepare a dispatch, and asked Parliament to write the motion off. Parliament did so.

A jurisdiction that administers an institution it has declined to enact is doing something specific. The governing law stays somewhere else, deliberately, and the concentration of trustees around Geneva rests on somebody else's.

A price that is published

The same instinct runs through expenditure-based taxation, federal in origin at article 14 of the direct federal tax act and article 6 of the harmonisation act, with the revised rules applying to federal tax from 1 January 2016. Geneva publishes its conditions: foreign nationality, with no benefit for a person holding Swiss nationality alongside another; unlimited liability arising for the first time or after an absence of at least ten years; no gainful activity in or from Switzerland. The minimum bases are indexed and republished annually, and the canton's table gives, for 2026, a federal minimum of 435,000 francs and a cantonal and communal minimum of 426,357 francs, or 468,993 francs with the ten per cent uplift applied in lieu of a separate wealth computation.

Whether that is sound policy is not a question this desk answers, and the structural observation survives without the answer. The word Swiss is still used to imply an arrangement that is not written down. Here it is written down annually, and the negotiation happens above a published floor rather than instead of one.

What the money still does not buy

The Federal Act of 16 December 1983 on the Acquisition of Real Estate by Persons Abroad requires a person abroad to obtain cantonal authorisation before acquiring real estate, and article 26 renders an unauthorised transaction ineffective and, in the listed cases, void. Article 2 paragraph 2 letter b exempts a property serving the acquirer as a principal dwelling at the place of his lawful and actual domicile. That is not a property rule. It asks where a life is, and it asks the buyer rather than the building. The same question is put in a different accent, to different authorities, in Monaco Presumes You Live There and The Flat Tax Moved the Income, Not the Law.

We act for families whose structures, trustees and banking relationships sit in Geneva: beneficial-ownership mapping, fund-flow analysis, counterparty enquiry into asset-holding and commodity-trading groups whose filings disclose little, and material Swiss counsel then uses or declines to use.

We hold no Swiss licence, keep no office in Geneva and do not practise Swiss law. Nothing above is legal or tax advice; structures are designed alongside independent counsel in each relevant territory, and a principal considering one should take advice from an adviser unrelated to Privy Consul.

The design discipline sits under Cross-Border Wealth Architecture and Institutional / Fiduciary Services & Trust Services, the evidential half under Litigation Support & Evidence.