Switzerland’s federal register of beneficial owners began operating on 1 October 2026, the day the Federal Act on the Transparency of Legal Persons came into force. The Federal Office of Justice runs it. The register records the people who control Swiss legal entities and foreign legal entities with a Swiss connection. It is closed to the public: authorities, financial intermediaries and advisers with duties under the Anti-Money Laundering Act may consult it for those duties.
The Office has published how it protects the data. The system runs on a specially secured network and stores data only on a physical server in Switzerland. The number of queries is limited and access requires multi-stage authentication. Internal and external tests probe the system for vulnerabilities.
The register opened about two months after a breach in Liechtenstein. Overnight into 30 July 2026, an unknown perpetrator copied data on the beneficial owners of about 31,000 registered entities from the principality’s register, Liechtenstein’s government reported on 2 August.
Every legal entity the law covers must register once and then report each change to its beneficial owners. The Office’s guidance sets maximum periods by entity type:
The first change to an entity’s commercial register entry after 1 October 2026 brings its deadline forward to one month from publication of the change in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce. Where every beneficial owner already appears in the commercial register as a partner or officer, the entity has two years. Foundations fall outside the law, although a foundation can sit in the control chain of a company that must report.
The register is the Confederation’s record. Every financial intermediary in Geneva keeps its own: the know-your-client files, or KYC files, in which it establishes who each client’s beneficial owner is and keeps the records the Anti-Money Laundering Act requires. Trustees and family offices hold the same material for the structures they administer.
Where those files sit in SharePoint, Teams or OneDrive, they are within reach of Microsoft Copilot, the assistant built into Microsoft 365. Microsoft’s documentation says that Copilot “only surfaces organizational data to which individual users have at least view permissions”. It applies the permissions it finds. A client folder shared too widely years ago can then be summarised for any colleague who can open it.
The questions the Office answered for the register apply to these files:
The Confederation has set out where its copy of these facts lives and who may query it. A compliance officer should be able to say the same of yours. Put this on your agenda, we can help you get there.