B-17-07 FINMA Circ. 17/7

Since March 2020, more than 100,000 Swiss companies have made use of the bonded loans set up by the Confederation to make up for a lack of liquidity following the COVID-19 pandemic. The Swiss authorities' desire to respond quickly to an exceptional situation and to ensure rapid access to funds led them to introduce a facilitated procedure, based essentially on a self-declaration by the credit applicant, which has unfortunately seen its share of abuses. In a recent ruling to be[...]

Since the adoption of the too-big-to-fail regime in 2011, article 52 BL stipulates that the Federal Council must examine the provisions of articles 7 to 14b BL three years after the system comes into force and then every two years, compare them with the corresponding international standards abroad and report back to the Federal Assembly, if necessary with proposals for amendments to the law or ordinances. In its report on systemically important banks of 4 June 2021 (FF 2021 1487),[...]

A bank that wishes to obtain a receivership against its clients in order to recover an overdraft resulting from an unsuccessful margin call and a liquidation of positions must make its claim plausible by means of detailed explanations and documents. Failing this, the judge must refuse - or revoke - the receivership (Federal Court ruling 5A_515/2023 of 23 February 2024). The dispute that gave rise to this judgment arose from a lombard loan granted by a Zurich bank to two[...]

Even if the company carrying out the credit scoring is not the company that ultimately decides whether to grant a loan, it takes an automated individual decision and must therefore inform the data subject (CJEU ruling of December 7, 2023 in case C-634/21, SCHUFA Holding AG). Following the refusal of a loan by a bank, a German national requested various items of information from SCHUFA, the leading German company for credit checks. The refusal of the loan was justified on[...]