Three supervisory themes dominated FINMA's April media conference — operational resilience, digital fraud, and concentration risk — each grounded in separate guidance publications issued in the preceding months: Guidance 05/2025 on operational resilience and Guidance 02/2026 on digital fraud are the operative documents behind the first two. The gap between the conference framing and what those themes mean for examination practice is where today's piece by Dr. iur. Servatius von Tatzenberg does its work — read it before your next supervisory dialogue.

Three appointments covered in today's pieces: Alain Girard brings a resolution background to the Banks division, Hedwig Ulmer Busenhart brings actuarial expertise to Insurance, and Beat Fellmann's term at the Übernahmekommission has been extended by one year. Read together with the BankG revision dispatch analysis, the Girard appointment is the most consequential for banks still calibrating their TBTF planning. The Fellmann extension means no change in UEK enforcement philosophy for pending offers — covered in full by Casimir von Firn.

FINMA's bank survey found significant gaps in how operational risk frameworks account for social engineering, deep-fake payment fraud, and fraud in establishing client relationships online and through unauthorised account access. The guidance note is shorter than what it implies for ICAAP documentation — von Tatzenberg maps the gap in today's piece. If your last operational risk review predates the guidance, treat this as a trigger.

The January 2026 Venezuela asset-freeze ordinance (RS 196.127.85, 37 designated persons) has made this a materially active programme. Von Tatzenberg's piece today explains why Swiss GCs — particularly at banks with Latin American correspondent relationships — are underestimating the exposure. The programme does not generate Russia-volume updates, which is precisely why it slips through screening reviews.

Two pieces in today's edition run naturally together: the revised Circular 2016/7 on video and online identification tightens conditions before onboarding (von Tatzenberg), and the Swiss state-issued e-ID — delayed to 1 December 2026 by the Federal Council on 25 February 2026 — will eventually become a distinct identification method (von Firn). The Circular revision already accommodates the e-ID, but the credential will not be available to financial intermediaries as an onboarding method until December 2026 at the earliest. If you are building or reviewing a KYC onboarding process in 2026, the Circular piece is required reading before the next technology decision; the e-ID is a planning input for later in the year, not a live option now.

Von Tatzenberg's piece on Art. 102 StGB is the one for boards, not just compliance teams. Switzerland's corporate criminal liability framework has structural weaknesses generating pressure from the OECD, from prosecutors, and from the parliamentary record. If your group's liability architecture still treats Art. 102 as a stable baseline, the piece flags specifically where that assumption is under stress.

In Commission v Italy (C-155/25), the ECJ found Italy in breach of Directive 1999/70/EC by failing to provide effective measures to prevent or sanction misuse of successive fixed-term contracts for public-sector administrative, technical, and auxiliary staff. The Court's analysis turned on whether national law provided sanctions that were genuine and effective rather than nominal — it did not, and the penalty regime for ATA staff was found to fall short of the directive's requirements. Covered in full by Casimir von Firn.

EU subsidiaries using rolling fixed-term contracts for similar categories of auxiliary or project staff should check whether the applicable national sanction regime meets the "effective and dissuasive" standard the Court applied. A contract structure that relies on national tolerance for repeated short-term renewals carries infringement exposure if the competent authority benchmarks against this ruling. Review jurisdiction-specific sanction provisions before the next HR cycle — the decision is about Italy, but the standard travels.

In Meta Platforms Ireland (C-797/23), the ECJ confirmed that under Art. 15(1) of the DSM Directive, Member States are required to provide press publishers with the right to fair compensation from platforms — mandatory harmonisation, not a Member State option — and once activated, that right must be genuinely fair, not symbolic. The ruling closes the platform argument that "fair compensation" could be set at zero. For Swiss media businesses with EU operations, the Belgian and German publisher frameworks are now on firmer legal ground. For platform operators, the next round of licensing negotiations just got harder.

An ECJ ruling in INPS (C-747/22) addresses whether requiring prior residence as a condition for social assistance constitutes indirect discrimination under EU free-movement law where it disproportionately affects mobile EU workers. The trigger was an Italian housing benefit. Any EU subsidiary offering residency-linked benefit schemes — pension top-ups, transport allowances, childcare subsidies — should have counsel review eligibility criteria against the Court's proportionality analysis. The specific holding, including the standard applied to the necessity assessment, will be covered in full once the ruling text is confirmed.

AG Emiliou's opinion in C-414/25 found the Italy-Albania protocol compatible with the Returns Directive, subject to conditions: genuine individual assessment at each stage, full access to legal representation, language assistance, contact with family and relevant authorities, full protection for minors and vulnerable persons, and no automatic prolongation of detention. These are not cosmetic caveats — they are the conditions that most replication attempts would fail. The political read is that the opinion gives cover to those in EU capitals who want to proceed. The legal read is that the corridor is narrower than the political read suggests. Keep both in mind when the legislative follow-on arrives in Strasbourg or in Bern.

Baker McKenzie's global rollout of Legora across all six practice groups — alongside Anthropic's launch this week of twelve Claude practice-area plugins plus connectors to iManage and NetDocuments — marks a point where external counsel's AI infrastructure routinely processes client documents. When a network-scale firm standardises on a single external platform, the data-governance question moves from a pilot concern to a standard matter-intake question.

For in-house teams, the operative question is no longer "does our panel use AI?" but "which platform does our panel use, and what data governance arrangement applies to our matter documents?" That question is easy to ask before the matter starts and surprisingly hard to answer mid-instruction. Add it to your panel onboarding checklist now, before the first document lands on a platform you did not approve.

Carta — the cap table and fund administration platform — has acquired Avantia and rebranded it Carta Law, embedding legal services within the platform where fund managers already do LP reporting. This is the logical direction for platform-embedded legal services, and it is heading towards Swiss PE and fund clients who already use Carta for fund administration. The regulatory question: Avantia operates as a regulated UK ALSP; that status does not automatically transfer to Switzerland under the Anwaltsgesetz. Have that conversation with Swiss counsel before the pitch deck arrives, not after.

The 9 June deadline for the GwV-FINMA partial revision is now three weeks out. As detailed at GwV-FINMA: Drei Klauseln, die die Beweislast vor dem 9. Juni verschieben, the revision covers four substantive areas: ownership-and-control understanding, embargo compliance, correspondent banking, and beneficial-owner declarations. For financial intermediaries with complex ownership structures, the UBO-transparency clauses carry the highest operational impact; the embargo-compliance and correspondent-banking provisions implement FATF recommendations and are not peripheral. Any financial intermediary with these exposures should have a draft position in circulation. If compliance has not flagged this as a calendar item, 9 June is now in your diary.

The 2023 Supreme Court ruling in PACCAR voided most standard-form litigation funding agreements as unenforceable damages-based agreements. The Litigation Funding Agreements (Enforceability) Bill was introduced in the House of Lords on 19 March 2026, but the government's 2026/2027 legislative programme does not include it — which is the source of the funders' disappointment. The bill is in the Lords pipeline; a Commons passage date does not exist. For Swiss and EU companies with English proceedings in their dispute resolution toolkit, funding arrangements still require bespoke drafting to clear PACCAR's reach. Ask English counsel whether your current funding structure is compliant before the next matter instruction, not during it.