How SwissAML can help you

The revised Anti-Money Laundering Act extends Swiss money-laundering obligations, for the first time, to a new category of professional: the advisers — lawyers, notaries, and fiduciaries — who form, manage, and administer trusts, foundations, and domiciliary companies (Art. 2 paras. 3bis and 3ter GwG, in force 1 October 2026). The obligation is act-based: it attaches to the activity performed, not to the status of the person performing it. A financial intermediary owes due diligence across the entire client relationship; an adviser owes it activity by activity, as each qualifying matter arises. The due-diligence acts are common to both — identification of the parties, determination of the beneficial owner, and documentation of the file — but the adviser’s perimeter is narrower, subject to statutory exclusions and a more limited beneficial-owner declaration trigger (Art. 8b GwG).

Swiss civil law contains no domestic trust statute. Gottshalden’s SwissAML allows these common-law structures to be modelled directly — settlor, trustee, protector, beneficial owner, discretionary beneficiaries and others — in the roles the practitioner already uses, with their ownership and interconnections preserved. SwissAML then applies the Swiss regulatory tests to those roles: the beneficial-owner thresholds (Art. 2a para. 3 / Art. 4 GwG) and the anti-money-laundering (AML) obligations the structure attracts — so the relationship is captured in its own terms, without re-expression in a civil-law form.

Within SwissAML, the parties are entered around a mandate. For a financial intermediary, it is the relationship itself that the law requires to be captured; for an adviser, the same parties are captured in connection with an activity — tied to the specific matter concerned. In both cases, the same AML evaluation is applied to each party. The single distinction is that an adviser bears no obligation to monitor transactions over the life of the relationship; that continuing-monitoring duty belongs to the financial-intermediary regime (Art. 8b, cf. Art. 6 GwG).

SwissAML provides the principal sign-off and, where a higher-risk mandate or activity requires it, the second approval necessary to open the business relationship (Art. 18 GwV-FINMA; a senior-management decision, renewed annually, for the highest-risk categories, Art. 19). The practitioner enters the relationships and grants the approval; responsibility remains with the firm, as the law intends — the system supports the officer “without relieving them of their responsibility” (Art. 24 GwV-FINMA).

Every Know Your Client (KYC) and AML document, the record of outstanding items, and the completeness required to substantiate the approval are gathered in a single place. SwissAML applies the automation the regulations permit, generates a risk score and, at the point of approval, records an audit and client-data snapshot and performs the required screening — each retained to the ten-year standard the law prescribes (Art. 7 GwG). That record and its screening remain available for each subsequent review throughout the relationship, so the firm can maintain the client in an approved state for the business undertaken.