Early Intervention: Can EU Law Serve as a Model for Introduction and Design under Swiss Law?

In the wake of the CS crisis, the Parliamentary Investigation Committee, the Federal Council, and FINMA have called for a concrete legal basis for early intervention measures in Swiss banking law. With the key parameters published in June 2025, the Federal Council has set out the framework for this.

The Working Paper shows that FINMA’s current toolkit lacks a sufficiently legally certain basis for effective early intervention. While ongoing supervision offers only indirect means of influence, and enforcement proceedings are too cumbersome due to high intervention thresholds and procedural hurdles, insolvency-law protective measures kick in too late to avert a crisis. A comparison with insurance supervisory law illustrates, however, that Swiss law already provides a legal basis for early preventive intervention where the interests of policyholders are at risk.

The analysis of the EU’s early intervention regime — including the recently adopted CMDI reform — makes clear that effective early intervention requires a clear statutory basis. From this, the author derives a concrete implementation proposal, which includes, among other things:

• a concrete statutory basis for FINMA early intervention measures
• no automatism and no obligation to intervene early
• applicability to all banks, with a risk-based supervisory approach, already before the stabilisation phase
• combined consideration of quantitative and qualitative triggers
• measures of varying degrees of intervention, such as interference with corporate governance, convening a general meeting, implementation of stabilisation plan measures, restriction of a bank’s business activities, or prohibition of distributions by the bank
• withdrawal of the suspensive effect of appeals, with the option to apply to a court for reinstatement
• the possibility to waive publication of early intervention measures

A central challenge remains that responsibility for strategy and risk management stays with the bank’s governing bodies despite state intervention powers.

The paper was written as a Master’s thesis in the MLE programme at the University of St. Gallen, supervised by Seraina Grünewald and Nina Reiser. It was completed by May 2026, before the Federal Council published the consultation on amendments to the Banking Act and the Liquidity Ordinance in August 2026.

ILE-HSG Working Paper No. 2026-32  More Working Papers