Switzerland has approved its first comprehensive national strategy for fighting money laundering and terrorist financing, the country’s Federal Council announced Friday. 

The strategy is intended to guide future measures across federal authorities and will be revisited as Switzerland updates its national risk assessment in 2026 and heads toward a Financial Action Task Force review in 2028, the council said. Under the plan, Switzerland will revamp how it assesses its money-laundering and terrorist-financing risks, expand access of relevant data among authorities, and improve how corporate beneficial-ownership data is collected and shared. 

Switzerland plans a broad update of its national money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk assessment this year, while a new federal beneficial-ownership register adopted by parliament in 2025 is due to become operational in the second half of 2026, the strategy noted. 

The plan also calls for additional resources to help the nation’s financial intelligence unit, MROS, better process more suspicious activity reports and additional tools for its supervisory body, FINMA, including the ability to impose monetary penalties on supervised institutions. 

The adoption of the strategy follows resistance last year from some Swiss lawmakers who sought to soften earlier anti-financial-crime proposals, arguing Switzerland needed to remain competitive in cross-border wealth management against rivals such as Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, Reuters reported. 

Read the Swiss national strategy here