What does a competitive financial centre look like to a Swiss SME?

Switzerland spends a lot of time thinking about the competitiveness of its financial centre. And rightly so.    

At the end of August, the Swiss Bankers Association brought together people from across banking and the wider financial sector to discuss how Switzerland can maintain its position in an increasingly challenging international environment.    

Trust, political stability and legal certainty were all identified as important strengths. Digitalisation and AI were also highlighted as decisive for future competitiveness.    

Reading the conclusions, though, I found myself looking at the question from the other side of the financial system:    

What does a competitive financial centre actually look like to the Swiss small businesses using it every day?    

Switzerland has one of the strongest and most trusted financial systems in the world.    

That’s something we should be proud of.    

But talk to someone running a small business and they’ll probably describe the financial system rather differently.    

They experience it when they open a company and a bank account. When they send an invoice, get paid and reconcile the payment.    

When they do the accounting, calculate VAT, hunt down the supporting documents they definitely saved somewhere, and send everything their fiduciary needs.    

And, ideally, when they find five minutes to work out how much cash the business actually has.    

To the entrepreneur, these aren’t separate financial products. They’re the everyday reality of running a business. And I think that’s an important distinction.    

We’ve done a great job of digitising individual parts of finance.    

But digital doesn’t automatically mean simple.    

You can have a digital bank, digital accounting, digital invoicing, digital payroll and digital document storage, and still spend your evening manually moving information between all of them.    

At which point, congratulations.    

You’ve accidentally become your company’s integration layer.    

That’s the part I think needs to change.    

The Branchenforum identified digitalisation and AI as important forces shaping the future competitiveness of Swiss banking.    

I’d add one very simple test for whether that digitalisation is actually working:    

Does the technology remove work from the entrepreneur?    

Or does it just turn the same work into clicks?    

For me, the competitiveness of a financial centre shouldn’t only be measured by the strength of its banks or its ability to attract capital.    

It should also be measured by something much more practical:    

How easy does it make it to start, run and grow a business?    

That means financial services working better together.    

It means banks, accountants, fiduciaries and technology providers operating as part of an ecosystem rather than separate worlds.    

And it means using technology to automate the work entrepreneurs shouldn’t have to do themselves, while using AI to help them better understand their business and make better decisions.    

Switzerland already has an extraordinary financial foundation.    

Trust, stability and legal certainty give us an enviable starting point.    

For me, the next opportunity is to make more of that strength visible outside the financial industry, in the everyday experience of the people building and running Swiss small businesses.    

Because ultimately, the best measure of financial infrastructure isn’t how sophisticated it looks from inside the industry.    

It’s how simple it makes running a business outside it.    

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