Swiss Company Registry Data: How to Search Zefix (2026)

The layers of Swiss company data

Swiss company data is split across the cantonal registers that hold the legal records, the federal bodies that index and identify companies, and the regulators that supervise financial institutions. Five sources matter for KYB.

The fifth source is the Federal Office of Justice (FOJ). Beyond housing the EHRA, the FOJ will operate Switzerland's new federal Transparency Register of beneficial owners under the Legal Entities Transparency Act, with the EasyGov platform as the reporting channel. Expected to go live in the second half of 2026, this register is the most significant change to Swiss corporate-ownership data in decades — though, as set out below, it will be accessible only to authorities and regulated intermediaries, not the public.

Why Switzerland's register is federated but unified

Switzerland's structure looks fragmented but works as one system in practice. The key architectural facts for anyone consuming the data:

• The cantons hold the legal records; Zefix indexes them. A company is registered in one canton, and that cantonal register is the authoritative source. Zefix federates all 26 into a single free search, so you rarely need to know the canton in advance — but for certified extracts and the deepest detail you go to the canton.
• One identifier ties everything together. The UID (CHE-XXX.XXX.XXX) is used across the commercial register, VAT, social insurance, customs, and statistics. Unlike jurisdictions with separate tax and registry numbers, Switzerland's single UID is the universal join key.
• Publication is centralised in the SOGC. Every entry, change, and deletion must be published in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce (SOGC / SHAB / FOSC). Publication is what makes a registered fact enforceable against third parties — and the gazette is a free, dated, structured feed of every change.
• Financial institutions sit under FINMA as well. A bank or insurer appears in the commercial register like any company, but its licence status lives with FINMA. Confirming a financial counterparty means checking both.
• Ownership transparency is uneven by legal form. A GmbH publishes its quota-holders; an AG does not publish its shareholders at all. Until the Transparency Register goes live, AG ownership is effectively opaque at the registry level.

For multi-jurisdiction KYB, Switzerland is closer to the UK end of the spectrum than the fragmented US or Australian state systems: one free national search, one identifier, one gazette — with the cantonal layer mattering only when you need certified documents or full detail.

Every Swiss company-data dataset, mapped

Across Zefix, the cantonal registers, the FSO, FINMA, and the gazette, twelve datasets matter for KYB. Switzerland sits firmly at the open end: the search, the identifier register, the gazette, and an API are all free, with charges only for certified documents and a restricted tier for supervisory and beneficial-ownership data.

Exactly what data is free, paid & restricted

The free tier covers everything most KYB checks need. Paid means certified, court-grade documents. Restricted means data the law reserves for authorities — including, from 2026, beneficial ownership.

Dataset-by-dataset summary

The same data, viewed by source rather than access tier:

Seven free, three paid, two restricted. Switzerland's register is genuinely open: name search, the UID/VAT register, the gazette feed, FINMA lists, and an API all cost nothing. The paid tier is purely about certified documents. The two restricted classes — beneficial ownership and AG shareholders — are the real coverage gaps, and the 2026 register narrows only the first of them, and only for authorities. Sources: EHRA / Zefix, FSO, FINMA, SECO, cantonal registers (verified May 2026).

The Swiss company identifiers

Swiss entities can carry several identifiers, but one — the UID — dominates. Any KYB integration should treat the UID as canonical and handle the legacy and financial-market identifiers on intake.

For production Swiss KYB, the UID is canonical — it resolves to the commercial-register record, the VAT status, and the statistical register in one number. The VAT suffix matters for invoice and tax validation, the EHRA-ID is useful for de-duplication against Zefix, the legacy CH-number needs mapping for older entities, and the LEI links Swiss entities into global financial-markets data.

Worked example: Nestlé S.A.

To anchor the identifiers and access mechanics in a real record, here is Nestlé S.A. — one of the world's largest companies and a Swiss company limited by shares (AG / SA):

Three things the example surfaces. First, the UID CHE-105.909.036 is the one number that resolves Nestlé across the commercial register, VAT, and statistics. Second, the registered purpose — participation in industrial, commercial, service, and financial enterprises in Switzerland and abroad — identifies Nestlé S.A. as the group holding company, distinct from its operating subsidiaries, each with its own UID. Third, because Nestlé is an AG, its shareholders are absent from the registry; what you can see is the company, its directors, and its auditor — but not who owns it. That gap is exactly what the 2026 Transparency Register is designed to close, for authorities.

What the Transparency Register will — and won't — expose

The most important change to Swiss company data in 2026 is the federal Transparency Register of beneficial owners, created by the Legal Entities Transparency Act (adopted by Parliament on 26 September 2025, with the referendum period passing without a vote). Treated as a registry-data question — what becomes available, and to whom — here is what matters.

Swiss legal entities, and certain foreign entities with a Swiss nexus, will have to report their beneficial owners to a central federal register run by the Federal Office of Justice, using the EasyGov platform. The reported fields include each beneficial owner's full name, date of birth, nationality, residential address, and the nature and extent of their control. A beneficial owner is generally someone holding 25% or more, or exercising control by other means; where none can be identified, the most senior executive is recorded. More than 500,000 companies are expected to fall within scope.

The decisive point for KYB is access. Unlike the public ownership registers in the UK or the partly-public register in Canada, the Swiss Transparency Register is non-public. Access is restricted to competent authorities and to financial intermediaries subject to the Anti-Money Laundering Act, for their own due-diligence purposes. A general commercial user will not be able to pull Swiss beneficial-ownership data from this register. So even after it goes live — expected in the second half of 2026, with transitional reporting deadlines — the practical position for most counterparty checks is unchanged: GmbH quota-holders remain public via the commercial register, AG shareholders remain unpublished, and verified beneficial ownership remains something to be established through direct due diligence rather than a public lookup.

API and bulk data feeds — the four real paths

For production KYB or supplier-verification integrations needing structured Swiss company data at scale, four access paths exist.

Path 1 — The Zefix REST API

Zefix exposes a free REST API that returns company records as JSON, queryable by UID or company name, with no authentication required for basic queries. It's the fastest way to confirm existence, resolve a UID, and pull legal form, status, registered office, and SOGC references — ideal for real-time verification at the point of onboarding.

Path 2 — The FSO UID register interfaces

The Federal Statistical Office's UID register offers SOAP and REST interfaces that add VAT registration status to the identity record. Because Switzerland sits outside the EU VIES system, this is the authoritative route for validating a Swiss VAT (MWST) number programmatically — useful for finance and tax-compliance workflows as well as KYB.

Path 3 — The SOGC gazette feed

Every register change is published in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, available as a dated, structured feed. Monitoring it lets you detect new incorporations, director changes, capital changes, liquidations, and deletions as they happen — the basis for ongoing counterparty monitoring rather than point-in-time checks.

Path 4 — commercial multi-jurisdiction APIs and bulk feeds

For teams that need Switzerland alongside other countries, commercial providers ingest Zefix, the cantonal registers, the UID register, FINMA, and the gazette and re-expose them through one API with a normalised schema — removing the need to stitch together the federal and cantonal layers per query. Zephira's Swiss data is sourced directly from these government registers, with Data Provenance attribution on every field, and joined to the UK, Canada, Singapore, the UAE, and 100+ other jurisdictions on a single data model. Bulk delivery via S3 or SFTP is available for batch enrichment and offline analytics.

Swiss entity types — what each one means for KYB

Swiss entity types are defined by the Code of Obligations. Six forms account for most records in a KYB workflow — and the ownership-transparency difference between the AG and the GmbH is the single most important distinction.

Where Zephira sources Swiss data from — directly

The most important question for any Swiss company-data provider is the source. Zephira goes direct, with source attribution on every record.

Every record carries a Data Provenance panel naming the specific government source and the timestamp of the last refresh. Beneficial-ownership data held in the federal Transparency Register, AG shareholder identities, and FINMA supervisory detail are not exposed via Zephira to non-authorised parties — those are restricted by Swiss law to competent authorities and regulated intermediaries.

Recent and upcoming regulatory developments

Six milestones shape the Swiss company-data landscape from 2011 through 2026. All dates verified from primary sources.

What the Swiss company base actually looks like

Two structural features make Switzerland distinctive for KYB, and neither is obvious from a single register lookup: an outsized concentration of global finance and commodity trading, and a company population that moves between cantons chasing tax. Both shape what a Swiss counterparty actually is.

A financial centre and the world's commodity-trading hub

Switzerland hosts a financial and trading sector far larger than its size suggests — which is precisely why so much KYB and AML scrutiny lands on Swiss counterparties.

Where Swiss companies cluster — and why they move

A Swiss company's registered canton is a deliberate choice, driven heavily by tax. Cantonal corporate tax rates range from roughly 11.8% in Zug to about 19.6% in Zurich and 14.7% in Geneva (combined federal, cantonal, and communal, 2025) — and companies relocate to capture the difference.

The sector & headquarters profile

Switzerland's company base is overwhelmingly services and SMEs, with a globally outsized concentration of multinational headquarters relative to its population:

Swiss registry activity — verified primary-source statistics

Two statistical lenses on the Swiss company-data landscape, drawn from primary sources and the major Swiss credit agencies.

Formations & deletions

Business survival & bankruptcies

Swiss registry data in regional context

How Switzerland's access regime compares to other major jurisdictions:

On the core record, Switzerland is among the most open registries anywhere — free search, a free API, and a free identifier-and-VAT register put it alongside the UK. Where it diverges is ownership: the UK publishes beneficial owners, while Switzerland keeps AG shareholders private and, even after 2026, restricts its beneficial-ownership register to authorities. For KYB, that makes the basic Swiss record easy to obtain and verified ownership the part that still requires real due diligence.