Switzerland is fundamentally revising its financial market legislation in order to harmonize it with European standards. The two new laws – the Financial Services Act (FinSA) and the Financial Institutions Act (FinIA) – were passed by the Swiss parliament. The FinIA will regulate the approval and organizational requirements as well as the internal processes, while the FinSA will define detailed rules for financial institutions when providing services to their clients in all phases. This is accompanied by the requirement of an independent compliance and risk management function. Implementing all requirements of the new regulation poses major challenges for independent asset managers in particular.

SwissComply provides you with a personal compliance & risk manager (outsourcing or body lending) who continuously monitors compliance with regulatory guidelines and supports you with their implementation. Furthermore, standardized processes are an important basis for effective risk minimization and at the same time ensure the necessary investor protection. SwissComply fully covers compliance and risk management throughout the entire life cycle of the client relationship, thus enabling high-quality asset management.

• We make sure you are in compliance with regulatory requirements at all times. This way you can justify the confidence of clients and arm yourself against business risks due to unintentional breaches.
• You get cost-effective access to established specialists with many years of experience in the areas of compliance, risk management and legal and thus save investments in your own resources.
• We have precise knowledge of the requirements of the supervisory authority and comprehensive knowledge of upcoming regulatory changes.
• We pursue practice-oriented solutions tailored to your needs, so that you do not receive theoretical concepts, but solutions suitable for everyday use.
• Your legal setup is future proof, you can focus on your core competencies and capture growth opportunities.
• In case of absence of compliance and risk managers (e.g. dismissal, illness or accident), you can quickly access specialists as part of a body lending to overcome temporary staff shortages.
• We always offer you a high quality of service, open communication and strive for a long-term partnership with you.
• All listed services can also be obtained as pure consulting services.

The obligation to introduce an ICS is not an invention of FinIA (Financial Institutions Act), which came into force in January 2020. The Swiss Code of Obligations has for some time required larger Swiss companies to implement an ICS as a risk management tool (Art. 728a). The CISA (now the FinIA) also explicitly prescribed the requirement of an effective ICS for asset managers of collective assets. With the FinIA, this obligation is now extended to all prudentially supervised financial service providers (regardless of size and business model).

In addition to this regulatory requirement (without an effective ICS, the FINMA licence will not be granted), it should not be forgotten that with the ICS, the management and board of directors have a valuable tool at their disposal to systematically identify risks in their company and to counter them in a timely and effective manner through control activities.

• Efficient annual risk analysis and control along predefined (and expandable) risk dimensions
• Risk control function with automatic e-mail notification and reminder
• SwissComply Standard Risk & Control Set with all necessary risk dimensions and controls, which are constantly adapted to changing regulatory requirements
• Dashboard for designated risk managers/managing directors (with statistics and reporting functions)