From 1 October 2026, the due diligence obligations under the Swiss Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) will also apply for the first time to certain advisory activities outside traditional financial intermediation. This may affect, among others, trust companies, family offices, law firms, real estate service providers and other professional service providers. However, neither the professional title nor the mandate as a whole is decisive. What matters is the specific service that is actually provided and whether it meets the legal requirements. Companies should therefore carefully review their existing and planned services. The question is not only which additional regulatory requirements will have to be met in the future. Companies must also decide whether newly covered mandates should continue to be handled internally or transferred to an already regulated service provider.
With the revision, the legislator is expanding the scope of the AMLA. In addition to traditional financial intermediation, certain advisory activities will also be covered. Separate legal obligations apply to these advisory activities. However, carrying out such activities does not automatically make a company a financial intermediary. For each specific activity, it must therefore be assessed whether it qualifies as financial intermediation, as an advisory activity, or whether it does not fall within the scope of the AMLA at all.
This distinction is particularly important for trust companies that provide different services from a single source.
The key question is therefore not:
“Will we be subject to the AMLA in the future?”
Instead, the question is:
“Which of our specific services will be relevant under the AMLA from 1 October 2026?”
The revised AMLA covers in particular the professional involvement in financial transactions connected with certain legal transactions.
These include in particular:
Non-operating legal entities are, in particular, structures that do not serve to carry out or support an operating business activity. Traditional domicile companies may fall into this category.
There are also legal exceptions, for example for certain family law or inheritance matters and for certain real estate and corporate transactions with a low money laundering risk.
The revision requires an activity-based assessment. For example, a trust company may provide accounting, tax advisory services, domicile services and support with distributions for the same client. These services do not necessarily have to be treated in the same way from a regulatory perspective. Accounting, tax advisory services or administrative support do not fall within the scope of the AMLA simply because the client uses a company or an asset structure. The situation may be different if the specific activity contributes to the preparation or execution of a covered financial transaction. If the service provider also has control over third-party assets, it must be assessed separately whether the activity already qualifies as financial intermediation.
The new advisory activities are only covered if they are carried out professionally. The Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance sets out several criteria for this. An activity is considered professional in particular if at least one of the following criteria is met:
Companies that offer services which may fall within the revised AMLA should systematically review their existing and planned mandates.
In particular, the following questions are relevant:
Based on this assessment, companies can determine which mandates may continue without additional AMLA obligations and for which activities new legal requirements must be observed. For the affected mandates, a business decision must then be made: Should the company continue to provide the service itself and establish the required regulatory organisation, or should individual mandates be transferred to an already regulated service provider?
The new legal requirements may require changes to onboarding, documentation, risk classification, internal controls, training and membership in a self-regulatory organisation. Especially where only a limited part of the existing business model is affected, it may make economic sense not to continue handling certain mandates internally. We support you in assessing your existing and planned services and determining which activities fall within the scope of the revised AMLA. If the affected mandates are to continue to be handled internally, we support you in preparing the required regulatory steps. If, however, a company decides that it no longer wishes to handle certain trust, corporate or domicile mandates itself, we would be pleased to assess whether swisspartners Xperts AG can take over these mandates. swisspartners Xperts AG already has established AMLA processes and regulatory structures.
For companies that are only affected by the new requirements in relation to individual mandates, transferring such mandates may therefore be an efficient alternative to establishing additional internal structures.
