The 2026 Swiss AML Reform for Trustees and Fiduciaries: What Changes and How to Prepare | OwnMore

The Swiss anti-money-laundering regime targets financial intermediaries — and many trustees and fiduciaries are already financial intermediaries under the GwG: they are affiliated to a self-regulatory organisation (SRO) and carry the associated due-diligence obligations. The 2026 reform adds a new layer: the non-public beneficial-ownership transparency register, which is specifically designed to illuminate the structures that trustees administer on behalf of their clients.

Holding companies, trusts, foundations, SPVs — these are precisely the vehicles used in the private real-estate market to hold property, structure capital participations and organise succession. A trustee administering several such structures for several clients sits at a single point from which all reporting obligations, all look-through duties and all monitoring duties radiate. That does not make the trustee the fall guy — it makes the trustee the structural pivot of a compliant ownership record.

A trustee who is well positioned therefore needs not just a general understanding of the AML duties but a structure-specific picture of what the new law means for each client mandate. This article tries to sharpen that picture.

The FATF-implementation act (LETA) was adopted by the Swiss parliament on 26 September 2025. Entry into force is expected in H2 2026; no fixed date has been set, and the implementing ordinances are to follow. The main change for trustees: a non-public national transparency register for beneficial ownership. It targets legal entities and other structures domiciled in Switzerland and requires the registration of the natural person or persons who ultimately own or control the structure.

The reporting obligation rests on the obliged party — typically the financial intermediary entering the relationship, not a platform operating in the background. A CHF 5 million threshold was discussed during the parliamentary process but was not enacted; what applies is determined by the adopted act and the still-pending ordinances. The benchmark for "beneficial owner" remains at its core unchanged: the natural person or persons holding ≥25 % of capital or voting rights, or otherwise exercising control.

The register is non-public: it is not freely accessible but available to competent authorities and certain obliged entities. That does not reduce the obligation to register accurately — it only means the register data is not a public disclosure the client voluntarily makes; it is a regulatory record the intermediary is required to maintain.

The greatest practical burden for trustees lies in the look-through requirement: the GwG demands not just knowledge of the contracting party — the holding or the trust as a legal person — but the natural persons behind it. For a trust that means: the settlor or settlors, the beneficiaries, and any persons who otherwise exercise control if that control establishes a dominant position. For a foundation it is analogous: the foundation board as the governing body, plus the beneficiaries insofar as they are beneficial owners in the regulatory sense.

For a trustee administering ten or twenty such structures, that means: ten or twenty separate look-through maps, each with their own natural persons, their own PEP and sanctions screens, and their own histories of change. If a beneficiary changes her domicile, a settlor marries into a politically exposed family, or a shareholder in a linked holding chain is replaced — each of those changes must be recognised, assessed and updated. The law demands not just registration at the start of the relationship, but currency throughout its duration.

This mapping burden is not new in principle — it is the core of any serious AML practice — but the transparency register raises the evidentiary bar materially: the authority will be able to ask not just who is the beneficial owner today, but who it was and when. That presupposes a complete, chronologically ordered documentation chain that many trustees still maintain today with spreadsheets and scanned folders.

Alongside the beneficial-ownership determination, source of funds remains a free-standing obligation. Where do the assets brought into the structure come from? For a real-estate SPV with multiple investors — one of the typical mandates of a fiduciary practice — that means: provenance evidence not just for the settlor or the subscribers, but for everyone who contributes above the threshold amount or qualifies as a beneficial owner. If any of those natural persons is a PEP or originates from a FATF grey-list jurisdiction, enhanced due diligence applies.

Sanctions screening is not a one-time event. A trustee must ensure it detects hits on sanctions lists — SECO, EU, OFAC and others — promptly and acts on them. That requires ongoing monitoring against current lists, not merely a screen at the start of the relationship. For a practice with many mandates, that presupposes either automated screening infrastructure or a clearly documented manual procedure with demonstrable cadence.

The record-retention obligation — currently ten years under the GwG — remains and is likely to be interpreted more strictly under the new register. Retention does not just mean archiving; it means retrievable linkage: who confirmed what and when, which documents evidence the findings, and can the complete audit trail of a mandate be reproduced on demand? An auditor or authority asking in 2031 about a mandate opened in 2026 expects a coherent, gapless answer.

A trustee administering multiple structures knows the problem: the documentation is scattered. For mandate A, the beneficial-ownership declaration sits in a folder from 2019, the updated passport in an e-mail from 2022, and the PEP screening log from last year in a spreadsheet created by the colleague who has since left the office. For mandate B, the picture is similar. The regulatory expectation of a "complete documentation chain" meets a structural reality that works against it.

What a trustee needs is not another folder — it is infrastructure that maintains, per structure and per deal, a chronologically ordered, immutable evidence thread: identification, beneficial ownership, source of funds, screening results, and at each change a new, dated layer — not overwritten, but appended. That is the opposite of a spreadsheet, and it is precisely what an authority wants to see when it asks about a mandate opened years ago.

An operating layer that structurally enforces this audit trail — that is, one that does not release binding stages until the relevant evidence has been recorded against the specific structure and the specific deal — solves the evidence problem not through more work but through better architecture. The trustee retains responsibility; but now has a foundation on which that responsibility is actually dischargeable.

OwnMore is Swiss private-market infrastructure with a compliance-native approach: onboarding — identification, beneficial ownership, source of funds — is a structural gate that precedes every binding stage. The entire sequence is recorded in an append-only SHA-256 audit chain, making the mandate's audit trail reproducible and chronologically ordered. That applies per investor, per structure and per deal — exactly the granularity a fiduciary practice with multiple clients needs.

What OwnMore is not is equally part of the picture. OwnMore is not a financial intermediary under the GwG and is not an SRO member; SRO affiliation and custody infrastructure are in preparation (pre-launch). OwnMore does not make anyone compliant — compliance is an obligation that remains with the trustee as the obliged party; OwnMore supplies the infrastructure layer on which the trustee can discharge that obligation. OwnMore does not file anything to the transparency register on behalf of clients — reporting obligations rest on the obliged parties themselves. And OwnMore is not a law firm; this article is educational, not legal advice.

For trustees and fiduciaries who want to map their mandates on the Swiss private market onto a structurally compliance-native layer — particularly in the area of real-estate holdings, SPVs and structured participations — the OwnMore team is available for a professional conversation. The right entry point is the contact form at ownmore.world/contact.