The 2026 Swiss AML Reform for Notaries and Lawyers: Due Diligence on Transaction Mandates | OwnMore

Switzerland’s current GwG places obligations primarily on financial intermediaries — banks, asset managers, payment service providers. Lawyers and notaries have to date largely stood outside the direct GwG perimeter, even though professional ethical rules and bar self-regulatory bodies impose their own duties. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) mutual evaluation reports have repeatedly pointed out to Switzerland that certain legal advisory activities — notably involvement in company formation, transaction and structuring mandates, and real-estate transactions — carry elevated money-laundering risk because they can facilitate the layering and concealment of assets through legally sound structures.

The LETA revision answers that international pressure directly: extending the circle of obligated persons to certain advisory activities is the centrepiece of the reform. Notaries and lawyers handling such mandates fall within the new perimeter under the enacted law — though the precise scope and its boundaries in detail depend on the implementing ordinances still to be issued and on interpretation by the competent authorities. Affected professionals are well advised to monitor developments closely and to engage early with their professional body and qualified counsel.

The Federal Act on the Transparency of Legal Entities and the Identification of Beneficial Owners (LETA) was adopted by the Swiss Parliament on 26 September 2025. Entry into force is expected in the second half of 2026; no fixed date has been set and implementing ordinances have not yet been issued. Anyone planning on the basis of current announcements must factor in this caveat.

The act introduces three structural innovations that are directly relevant to notaries and lawyers. First, a transparency register of beneficial owners of legal entities is created, into which certain companies must enter their beneficial owners. Second, the circle of persons subject to GwG obligations is extended to certain advisory activities, which is the central innovation for the legal professions. Third, due-diligence and reporting duties are adjusted accordingly and extended to the new obligated persons.

Much discussed during the legislative process was a potential threshold of CHF 5 million above which real-estate transactions might fall within the perimeter. That threshold was not enacted in the adopted legislative text as currently understood; the precise demarcation for real-estate transactions is a matter for implementing ordinances and interpretation. Notaries and lawyers should not rely on any particular threshold until the ordinances have been issued.

The new regime appears directed at three categories of mandate: first, company formation and structuring — that is, the establishment of operating companies, holding structures, sub-holdings and related forms; second, the setting up of special-purpose vehicles (SPVs), acquisition vehicles and other structures used to acquire, manage or transfer assets; third, involvement in certain real-estate transactions, in particular advising on the purchase, sale or transfer of real property.

Whether a specific mandate is captured depends on the enacted legislative text, the implementing ordinances, and the professional’s own disciplinary rules. That cannot be definitively answered in an article and should be clarified individually with qualified counsel and the professional’s own bar or notarial body. It is advisable to monitor the development of the ordinances closely and not to assume a settled legal position before one actually exists.

Purely contentious activities (litigation) or general legal advice unconnected to a transaction or structuring are likely not captured. However, the precise boundary — in particular the question of at what degree of involvement a mandate qualifies as "advisory" within the new perimeter — is not yet definitively defined and remains one of the central open questions until entry into force.

For mandates within the new perimeter, GwG due-diligence duties apply that are structurally comparable to those of classical financial intermediaries but adapted to the advisory context: identification of the contracting party (natural person or legal entity), determination of the beneficial owners (the natural person behind the structure), establishment of the source of funds proportionate to the transaction risk, sanctions and PEP screening, ongoing monitoring of the business relationship, and retention of documents and records. In elevated-risk situations — for example where a beneficial owner is a politically exposed person, where structures span high-risk jurisdictions, or where unusual transaction features are present — enhanced due diligence applies.

Professional secrecy — the lawyers’ professional secret under Art. 13 BGFA and the notarial official secret — is a central topic that this article cannot and does not attempt to resolve definitively. The question of how the new GwG regime interacts with professional secrecy, in particular whether and to what extent reporting duties to MROS are overlaid or modified by professional secrecy, is legally complex, not yet definitively settled in all its details, and subject to interpretation by courts, professional bodies and authorities. Affected professionals should address this question expressly with their professional body and qualified counsel.

What is clear: the law recognises the position of the legal advisory professions and provides for corresponding demarcations; the details lie in the ordinances yet to be issued and in practice as it develops. It is not the purpose of this article to determine that boundary for any specific mandate.

Professionals handling many transaction and structuring mandates know the problem: due-diligence documentation is scattered across mandates, practice-management systems, email archives and paper dossiers. For a single transaction that may be manageable; for a systematic review — by a supervisory authority, in the context of mandate liability, or in the event of a suspicious-activity report — a fragmented documentation picture is a material risk.

The new GwG obligation intensifies the push toward a traceable per-mandate due-diligence path: who identified the party, when, on what basis? Who determined beneficial ownership and how? What source of funds was established, with what result? Was a PEP screening conducted? Are the documents complete and retrievable? A reliable, audit-proof record for each mandate is from now on not merely good practice but a duty.

An operational layer — whether a mandate-management system with structured compliance fields, a digital document repository with timestamps, or shared infrastructure for transaction parties — can enforce that record structurally rather than making it dependent on individual diligence. Where transaction parties onboard on shared infrastructure, the due-diligence trail problem is substantially simplified: the check is conducted once, recorded once, and the documentation is available without assembly effort.

OwnMore is Swiss private-market investment and real-estate transaction infrastructure. The platform treats KYC/AML onboarding as a structural gate: identification of the party, determination of beneficial ownership, establishment of the source of funds, and screening are completed before any binding step and are recorded in an append-only SHA-256 audit chain. For notaries and lawyers involved in transactions where a party has onboarded through OwnMore, that due-diligence trail is structured and traceable — rather than scattered across files.

Three clear distinctions matter. First: OwnMore is not a financial intermediary in the supervisory sense for the audience of this article, not a law firm, not a notarial practice, and not a regulatory authority; it does not set the GwG rules and does not replace a notary’s or lawyer’s own due-diligence obligations. Second: OwnMore does not make anyone compliant — compliance is an obligation of each individual duty-bearer; the platform supplies structured records and an audit trail, but whether that satisfies your own obligations is a legal question for you and your counsel.

Third: OwnMore is pre-launch; its SRO membership and screening offering are in preparation. The platform publishes no client names, assets under management, returns or track record. Professional counterparties — notaries, lawyers and institutional partners — interested in a conversation about the infrastructure are invited to use the contact form; access for qualified investors is via /access.