Regulatory Affairs

Our team covers all our regulated Financial Market Infrastructure (FMI) business areas. We identify, monitor and influence market and other policy initiatives across the complete FMI landscape at national and international levels.

We engage with a wide range of interlocutors active in our areas of business to share our views and to encourage a dialogue focused on improving FMI’s ability to provide robust products and services which benefit the clients and markets in which we operate. These include domestic regulators the Swiss Financial Market Authority (FINMA) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB) who provide our core authorisations through to international bodies such as our relevant trade associations, National Competent Authorities in the jurisdictions in which we operate and the EU regulatory bodies.

The Swiss Stock Exchange offers services both domestically and internationally and this latter aspect is why engagement with foreign authorities and associations is a fundamental element of our business.

All our FMI businesses are authorised by FINMA under the Financial Markets Infrastructure Act (FMIA). Further details can be found here.

In addition the SNB, under the National Bank Act, has the task to contribute to the stability of the financial system and the Act assigns the oversight of systemically important financial market infrastructures to the SNB. In this regard the SNB cooperates with FINMA. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) contains a clear division of the individual responsibilities of the two institutions and regulations on their cooperation. Further details can be found here

Our FMI businesses include:

• SIX Swiss Exchange AG
• SIX Repo AG
• SIX x-clear AG – designated as systemically important FMI in Switzerland
• SIX SIS AG – designated as systemically important FMI in Switzerland
• SIX Trade Repository AG
  
  

Our FMI businesses must comply with a range of regulatory requirements as part of our authorisations and which includes stress tests by the risk control function and regular internal and external auditing of key aspects of the business.

In addition our systemically important market infrastructures make disclosures in line with the CPMI-IOSCO disclosure framework. These disclosures can be found below.

More information on oversight can be found here.

We engage with a number of institutions and organisations to advocate for continued development to ensure the effective functioning of the financial markets and of our FMI businesses and to engage with legislators in the evolution to the regulatory environment we operate within.

We are members of a number of national and international industry associations which focus on legislative and other relevant initiatives arising from the national and international institutions. We also monitor activities of transnational organisations such as IOSCO, BIS and the FSB, where relevant to our business activities. We actively contribute to the work undertaken by these associations and endorse many of the policy positions they promote to enhance the efficiency of FMI globally.

The core domestic associations representing our FMI business are:

The core international associations representing our FMI business are:

List of memberships across all SIX business lines can be found here.

Domestic regulations are clearly a very important part of our activities and our authorisations are dependent on successful adoption. We engage in international regulations because many of our businesses are active in this space and we are required to perform certain activities in-line with these requirement as an enabler to conduct business. The core non-exhaustive areas of legislation currently under review impacting our FMI businesses are:

Domestic:

• Financial Market Infrastructure Act (FMIA)
• Recovery & Resolution (R&R)

International:

• CSDR
• EMIR
• MIFID 2.1
• SRD II

As part of our regulatory affairs coverage, we seek to influence developing and current prudential, market and other policy initiatives. Public response to such initiatives are show here along with our regular disclosures for CPMI-IOSCO