The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) on April 9 published a supervisory notice on digital fraud risks, saying a late-2025 survey of 19 banks found gaps in operational risk management and anti-money-laundering (AML) prevention.
FINMA said it surveyed banks across different supervisory categories at the end of 2025. The results confirmed that institutions need to strengthen controls in two areas: digital account opening and unauthorized access to existing accounts.
The regulator framed digital fraud as a two-sided problem. Customers are directly victimized through scams and account compromise, but bank accounts are also used to process fraud proceeds. That second channel is why FINMA links fraud prevention to AML controls. The regulator expects transaction monitoring, mule-account detection, and suspicious activity handling to be part of the same framework as fraud prevention.
FINMA said banks and persons under Article 1b of the Bank Act should have risk management systems that cover the full business, capable of identifying, assessing, steering, and monitoring digital fraud risks.
The notice does not introduce new rules. It formalizes supervisory expectations and is designed to push firms toward institution-wide controls rather than fragmented tools.
The publication fits a broader pattern. FINMA’s 2025 Risk Monitor identified cyberattacks, outsourcing, and operational resilience as principal risks, and the authority published separate guidance on cyber risks in June 2024. The new fraud notice extends that supervisory logic from cyberattacks to digitally enabled fraud.
