Swiss Lawmakers Reportedly Endorse Capital Proposals For UBS

Tom Burroughes

4 September 2026

This week Swiss lawmakers were quoted saying that (SBA) said the committee’s proposal still “goes beyond international standards” and said it rejected this “Swiss special path.”

UBS still concerned
said it acknowledged legislators’ efforts to find an alternative to the Federal Council’s “extreme proposals”. The bank said in a statement last week that it supports “targeted adjustments” to Swiss banking regulation that fit with international standards and tackle the “root causes” of what caused Credit Suisse to unravel as a bank three years ago.

However, UBS said, the committee’s recommendations would cause a “significant increase” in UBS’s costs. Along with other regulatory moves, the proposals would “further increase the financing costs for the Swiss financial centre and economy in an international environment in which other major financial centers are simplifying and streamlining their regulatory frameworks for banks”.

The bank said, for example, that the committee’s proposals would require UBS’s parent bank (UBS AG) to fully underpin its investments in foreign subsidiaries, with 50 per cent CET1 capital and up to 50 per cent Additional Tier 1 (AT1) capital, up from 45 per cent CET1 capital and 17 per cent AT1 backing under current law.

“This would represent a substantial tightening of Swiss capital requirements, which are already among the most stringent in the world,” the bank said.

UBS said it estimated that the recommendations would require it to hold incremental Tier 1 capital of around $13 billion at UBS AG that could be met with AT1 capital. This would add to the incremental $2 billion of CET1 capital that UBS AG will need to hold because of changes enacted by the Federal Council earlier in 2026.

“The problem at Credit Suisse was not that capital requirements were too low, but rather the far-reaching and untenable exemptions that FINMA granted exclusively to Credit Suisse over a period of years. The logical lesson to be learnt from this would therefore be to rule out such exemptions in future and to implement the applicable rules consistently,” the SBA said, referring to the stance of the Swiss regulator and the problems that had accumulated at Credit Suisse.