Regulation follows activity, not labels

FINMA does not regulate "fintechs"; it regulates financial activities. Whether your product is described as a wallet, a platform, a marketplace or an app is irrelevant — what matters is what happens to money and assets when clients use it. That is good news and bad news. Good, because there is no blanket licence requirement for building technology in finance. Bad, because a single feature added in a sprint — holding a balance, forwarding a payment, executing an order — can quietly move the product into regulated territory.

The classic triggers

Four activities account for most licensing questions in fintech:

  • Accepting deposits from the public — taking money that you owe back is, in principle, banking, and it is the trigger founders most often stumble into without noticing.
  • Holding client assets — custody of funds, securities or crypto assets for clients brings its own regulatory expectations, distinct from merely displaying them.
  • Payment services — moving money between parties can trigger financial-market rules and, almost always, anti-money-laundering obligations, which apply far below the threshold of any licence.
  • Securities activities — issuing, dealing in or operating a venue for securities is among the most intensively regulated things a company can do.

Note the asymmetry: even where no licence is required, anti-money-laundering duties frequently still apply. "Unlicensed" does not mean "unregulated".

Product design decides

The regulatory outcome is usually a design decision. Whether client money sits with you or with a licensed partner bank, whether balances are held or passed straight through, whether you execute trades or merely transmit instructions — each of these choices can be made in more than one way, and the ways differ in regulatory weight. Swiss law also provides deliberate room for experimentation, including a sandbox regime that allows limited deposit-taking below defined bounds, and a fintech licence category lighter than a full banking licence. These are design tools, not loopholes — they work only for models built to fit them.

The cost of asking late

The expensive version of this question is the one asked after launch. Operating a licensable activity without authorisation is not a formality problem: FINMA can investigate, order business changes and, in serious cases, wind an activity down — and the personal exposure of those responsible is real. Even short of that, discovering a licensing issue during a financing round or a partnership negotiation, when the counterparty's lawyers find it first, damages the deal at the worst moment.

The cheap version is asked at the whiteboard, when the money flows can still be drawn differently. If you are designing or changing a product that touches client money or assets, it is worth discussing the specific setup with a lawyer before it ships.