Last week, the Swiss structured products specialist and financial technology business, had a change to its share ownership.

Switzerland-based Leonteq, a structured products firm in which Raiffeisen Switzerland sold a 22.7 per cent stake last week, announced last Friday that a group of private investors now hold 30 per cent of its stock. 

Rainer-Marc Frey, Adrian Gut, Felix Oegerli, Tatjana Frey and Herbert Item, who formed the group, hold the shares, Leonteq said in a statement. The group was formed to close the transaction with Raiffeisen Switzerland. A large portion of these shares is indirectly held through H21 Macro Limited in the Cayman Islands, the statement said. 

Earlier in March, Raiffeisen Switzerland told Leonteq that it had sold a stake to H21 Macro and the investors, subject to customary regulatory clearance. Raiffeisen retains a 7 per cent stake.

Leonteq expects the transaction to be completed in the third quarter of this year at the latest.

Raiffeisen has partnered with Leonteq since 2013; the cooperation agreement, which runs until 2030, is not affected by the share sale, it said in its 2 March statement.

Regulatory change
Leonteq said that under its move to a new regulatory regime, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has confirmed that Leonteq Securities AG can be classed by counterparties to the status of “banks” under the Swiss Capital Adequacy Ordinance. This means that hedging counterparties and white-labelling partners will be able to risk-weight exposures to Leonteq in line with the treatment applicable to banks (rather than as exposures to a corporate counterparty, which are subject to higher risk-weighting charges), it said. 

“We welcome this final step in the transition to the new regulatory framework. Together with our strong CET1 ratio of 16.9 per cent at end-2025, the bank-equivalent treatment further enhances our risk and credit profile with counterparties. This reinforces our conviction that we are on the right track, and we remain fully focused on revenue growth and on reaching our 2026 guidance and mid-term goals.” (The ratio – Common Equity Tier 1 – is a standard international measure of a bank’s capital shock absorber.)