Newsletter 699: FinSA: Registration in Register for Client Advisers

Ladies and Gentlemen
Dear members

With FinSA coming into force on 1 January 2020, the new legal category of client advisers has been implemented. According to FinSA, client advisers of Swiss financial service providers which do not require a license by FINMA as well as client advisers of foreign financial service providers must register themselves with a Swiss Register for Client Advisers. The deadline for this registration is December 2020.

If your business activity thus does not trigger any supervision and licensing obligation of FINMA but falls under FinSA’s definition of financial services, we recommend you to verify the potential obligation to register with the Register for Client Advisers. FinSA defines the following activities as financial services (cf. Art. 3 lit. c):

• acquisition or disposal of financial instruments,

• receipt and transmission of orders in relation to financial instruments,

• administration of financial instruments (portfolio management),

• provision of personal recommendations on transactions with financial instruments (investment advice),

• granting of loans to finance transactions with financial instruments.

So far, FINMA has only approved one Register for Client Advisers, which is the one of the Berne Exchange BX Swiss. You can find all information about this Register for Client Advisers under www.regservices.ch. We are pleased to announce to you that the Register for Client Advisers BX Swiss will grant all members of VQF an initial discount of CHF 50 when registering with the Register.

When visiting www.regservices.ch, you can enter the code “VQF2020” under the Credit Card module. Members of VQF who have already registered themselves or have already submitted their application for registration can write to office@regservices.ch until end of August 2020 to be reimbursed with said discount.

Kind regards

VQF
Financial Services Standards Association