Category: Regulations

Everything about legal and other ramifications.

Securities Business in Transition: Why Automation, Integration and Modularity Determine Competitiveness

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The securities business in the DACH region is now technologically mature. An anonymised provider survey on service design shows why competition is shifting all the same: interfaces, automation and modular architectures have become standard equipment. The distance between providers opens up elsewhere.

Three findings from the analysis:

– Most providers share a solid, comparable technological base. It has become a hygiene factor. The gap is created by depth of automation, integration quality and modularity.

– Automation tends to cover individual steps rather than the full process. The bottleneck is exception handling: incomplete data, regulatory warnings, special cases in savings plans. Without structured exception handling, automation reaches its limits as volumes grow.

– Interfaces exist almost everywhere, but their usability differs widely. Providers that run their APIs as a product, with a clear scope and stable data models, connect partners faster and scale services more efficiently.

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All, Data, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, Regulations, technologies

Portfolio Management Infrastructure for an Open Banking World

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Increasing efficiency in Swiss wealth management: This article highlights how open banking and the standardization of data and calculations are laying the foundation for innovative portfolio management infrastructures—and why this foundation is essential for the successful use of artificial intelligence. An outlook on the future of Switzerland as a financial center.

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AI, All, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, Open Finance, Regulations

(Open) Corporate Foresight: The Potential of Strategic Future Analysis in Start-ups

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Actively shaping the future: corporate foresight as a start-up advantage

Many start-ups rely on agility—but in uncertain, complex markets, that is not enough. If you want to identify opportunities early on and better assess risks, you need a structured view of the future: corporate foresight.

Corporate foresight allows weak signals and new trends to be identified at an early stage. Open foresight expands this approach by involving external partners and communities, creating collective intelligence for better decisions.

Lean startup and foresight are not contradictory: while lean startup enables rapid validation of ideas, foresight provides strategic orientation. Together, they reduce uncertainty and strengthen innovative power.

In our latest blog post, Simon Dummel shows that future competence is not a luxury for startups, but rather the foundation for sustainable success.

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All, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, Regulations, technologies

Transformation of the Financial Market Infrastructure in Switzerland: The Role of Stablecoins and Deposit Tokens

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Stablecoins and Deposit Tokens are transforming financial market infrastructure and are rapidly gaining momentum in Switzerland. In our latest article, we unpack what these forms of tokenized money mean for payments, settlement, and the broader banking ecosystem.
What truly distinguishes stablecoins from deposit tokens in practice? Which Swiss milestones matter most for moving from pilots to production, and what can we learn from recent bank and industry initiatives? Most importantly, what steps should banks take now on strategy, processes, and technology to stay compliant and competitive?

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All, Data, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, Regulations, technologies

Open Finance in International Comparison – Insights for Switzerland

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Open Finance is transforming the global financial industry and is becoming increasingly important in Switzerland as well. In the first part of our blog series, Stefan Knaus exam-ined the current state of Open Finance within Switzerland. In this second part, Friedrich-Philipp Wazinski takes the discussion beyond national borders.
How far have other countries come in implementing Open Finance? What lessons can be learned from international initiatives? And what steps must Switzerland take to ensure it remains competitive in the global marketplace?

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All, News, Nicht kategorisiert, Open Finance, OpenBankingProject, Regulations, technologies

Potentials and challenges of the Swiss E-ID (1/2)

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The Swiss Confederation will provide electronic proof of identity (e-ID) for Swiss citizens in spring 2026. The underlying trust infrastructure is based on the Self-Sovereign Identity architectural approach. These developments offer significant opportunities for the various economic sectors in Switzerland but also challenges in the effective implementation and use of verifiable credentials. In addition to the use of the Swiss e-ID as proof of identification for opening a bank account, participation in the Confederation’s trust infrastructure offers further potential for Swiss banks. The e-ID can be used in other customer processes and significantly improve the customer experience. In addition, banks can also issue their own proof of identity on the Confederation’s trust infrastructure (Source).
This is the first part of a two-part blog post series on the Proof of Value of the OpenBankingProject.ch on the topic of “Use of Swiss E-ID”, which took place from October 2024 to February 2025.

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All, Data, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, Regulations, technologies

Retrospective of the 11th member event of the OpenBankingProject.ch

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On November 13, the members of the OpenBankingProject.ch met for the eleventh time to discuss current developments in the field of open banking in Switzerland and to take a look into the future together. The event offered exciting insights into the latest advances and chal-lenges in the sector. In this blog post, the most important highlights and insights of the day are described.

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Data, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, OpenBankingProject, Regulations, technologies

The art of cooperation

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More and more companies are entering into partnerships to achieve benefits such as cost reduction, standardization, flexibility and increased quality. Such relationships are essential in order to remain competitive in a complex world. Nevertheless, numerous examples show that failures with far-reaching consequences can also occur. This blog post shows the factors that make partnerships successful and the norms that need to be met.

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All, Ecosystems, News, Nicht kategorisiert, Regulations

Leadership in Swiss Banks

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How are leadership styles developing in Swiss banks – basically, Lewin’s traditional leadership styles such as authoritarian/patriarchal, cooperative, etc. are well known. Nowadays, a distinction can also be made between transactional and transformational leadership. This article explains how these leadership styles differ from each other and why the leadership styles in banks are changing towards agile organizational forms.

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All, Data, Digitization, Ecosystems, Nicht kategorisiert, Regulations, technologies

Insights from the Open Banking Summit 2022

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“Financial Industry Meets BigTech”: On the 25th of August 2022, the third Open Banking Summit opened its doors in the Google event rooms in Zurich. The OpenBankingProject.ch organized this event for the third time and once again provided a stimulating get-together on the topic of open banking. The event featured national and international success stories, and the subsequent panel discussion reflected on and discussed selected topics and questions posed by the audience. Once again this year, around 120 decision-makers from the Swiss financial sector gathered to learn about current developments and to network over the subsequent aperitif.

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All, Data, Ecosystems, News, Regulations, technologies

Opportunities & Challenges for Banks in the Context of Decentralized Finance

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The term decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to a decentralized, blockchain-based architecture for processing financial transactions without intermediaries. we will show in this article why offering access to digital assets and DeFi business models is worthwhile for financial institutions and what challenges they have to overcome in order to provide such an offering to their customers. Based on practical examples, positioning possibilities for regulated institutions will be presented as well as concrete opportunities and challenges.

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All, Data, Digitization, Ecosystems, Regulations, technologies

Open Banking and the (Eternal?) Crucial Question: Market-Driven or Regulated?

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For a good four years now, open banking has been a topic considered relevant by the Swiss financial industry. This was triggered in particular by the EU regulation PSD2, which became valid for all member states in 2018 and was subsequently implemented. Various players have been working on this topic since then, but implementation is progressing slowly.For this reason, the State Secretariat for International Financial Matters (SIF) feels compelled to make a clear announcement. Regulation seems to be getting closer.

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All, Data, Ecosystems, Regulations

Cross-Company Data Exchange in a Cross-Industry Trust Network – Added Value for Customers, Companies and Partners! 

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More extensive business cases such as opening a bank account or an account with a FinTech require several minutes of time each for a low-value-added customer experience – wouldn’t it be great if you could skip all the tedious steps relating to data collection during onboarding and start right away with the advisory service or the effective satisfaction of your core needs? These and other questions have been considered for a little more than half a year as part of a workshop series of the OpenBankingProject.ch (OBP) and discussed together with more than 30 companies from the Swiss financial industry. This article is intended to provide an overview of the background, initial delivery results as well as the current state of knowledge of the efforts within the OpenBankingProject.ch workshop series.

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All, Data, Ecosystems, Regulations

Money – What Is It Anyway?

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What is money anyway? Sure, it’s something we pay with, and according to the International Monetary Fund, something modern economies couldn’t function without. In today’s blog post, we’ll dig a little deeper into the meaning of money and get a broader picture of what it is. The question is, in my view, particularly relevant today, when new constructs such as cryptocurrencies, which diverge from what is generally considered money, such as the euro, Swiss franc or US dollar, are sometimes considered “money”.

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All, Regulations, technologies

Synthetic Data – The Future of Data-Driven Financial Services?

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One of the biggest challenges in this context is the handling of bank-specific and personal data and its processing by artificial intelligence (AI). The basis of data-driven services is a high-quality and up-to-date database. But not all companies have a large enough database to train an algorithm, and the sharing and basic use of some data is strictly limited – sometimes even within the company. To counteract these problems, the concept of synthetic data has become established.

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All, Data, Regulations, technologies

Target Models for a Digital Asset Offering in the Regulated Space

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The topic of digital assets has finally reached the mainstream. The potential for services that make it easier for customers to acquire digital assets is great, but so far only a few financial institutions offer such services. According to the banks, there are many reasons for the lack of a comprehensive offering, e.g. concerns about the value of digital assets, high scepticism regarding money laundering or a lack of know-how in the operational handling of the new asset class. This blog post addresses the last point and aims to show that there are various operational implementation options for a basic digital asset offering for regulated banks.

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All, Regulations, technologies

Gaia-X – A Revolution for the Financial Industry?

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Cloud solutions are faster, more flexible and less expensive than on-premise solutions. However, the best-known cloud infrastructures – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM’s Red Hat – all have one thing in common: they are headquartered in the USA and are therefore subject to the (decidedly lax) US data protection “law”. This makes using the services difficult from a data protection perspective, especially for financial institutions. The European Gaia-X project could be a real alternative.

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All, Data, Digitization, Ecosystems, Regulations, technologies

Sustainable Finance: A Step Toward the Circular Economy

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Sustainability is on everyone’s lips and now impacts all regions and sectors of the global economy. Increasingly, financial industry stakeholders, including customers, investors, suppliers and regulators, expect financial services providers to play an active role in financing the transition from a linear economy to a circular economy. ESG criteria are a tool for companies to become more sustainable and to comply with the regulatory efforts of policymakers and regulators.

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All, Regulations

Open Banking Summit 2020 – Opportunities and Implementation Scenarios for Open Banking in Switzerland

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Recently, the Swiss Bankers Association published an overview that outlines the status of open banking in Switzerland and formulates requirements for its further development of open banking. These requirements include the clear strategic positioning of Swiss banks and the joint development of standardized APIs for data exchange between financial institutions and third-party providers. The aim of this overview is to “support the dialogue in the financial center”, as Richard Hess writes in the initial contribution to the blog parade of the Swiss Bankers Association. The Open Banking Summit of the standardization initiative OpenBankingProject.ch pursued the same goal on September 10th, with various presentations focusing on these two requirements.

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All, Data, Digitization, Ecosystems, News, Regulations, technologies

Reflections on the Future of Swiss Banking

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The financial sector is currently facing one of its biggest challenges with the Corona pandemic: A collapse in economic growth, high unemployment, credit defaults and volatile stock markets. Furthermore, the old problems such as pressure on margins, increasingly intense competition, the shift of the customer interface towards innovative fintechs and the ubiquitous digitalization have not yet been solved. These developments challenge traditional business models of local banks, but also offer opportunities for those who are willing to change or reinvent themselves.

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All, Data, Digitization, Ecosystems, Regulations, technologies

Are we heading for a happy society?

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In a few years’ time, new or further developed sensors in smartwatches will not only record the wearer’s movements, but also their heart rhythm and breathing as well as their stress levels via measuring their skin surface tension. Around the world, thousands of developers are working on the new possibilities, hundreds of investors are evaluating the economic potential, and millions of consumers are waiting for the new gadgets. Will intelligent machines such as smartwatches with such capabilities bring us one step closer to a happy society?

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All, Data, Digitization, Ecosystems, Regulations, technologies