Switzerland’s Federal Act on the Transparency of Legal Entities and the Identification of Beneficial Owners (LTPM) officially enters into force on 1 October 2026. From that date, every société anonyme (SA), société à responsabilité limitée (Sàrl) and most other legal entities registered in the commercial register must declare their beneficial owners in a centralised federal register (LTPM, Fedlex). Filings are made exclusively online through the EasyGov.swiss platform.
Background
The LTPM is part of an international compliance framework driven by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which has long required member countries to establish beneficial ownership registers to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. France established its own beneficial ownership register (RBE) in 2017; most EU member states followed under the 4th and 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directives. Switzerland, not an EU member but closely aligned with FATF standards, is now legislating in turn.
The scope is clearly defined: any individual who directly or indirectly holds at least 25% of the capital or voting rights of a company, or exercises control by other means, must be declared. The obligation falls on the highest management body: the board of directors for an SA, the management for a Sàrl (Bexio, 17 September 2026).
Impact for Businesses
What Changes in Practice
Each filing must include the beneficial owner’s full identity: name, date of birth, nationality, residential address, and the nature of the control exercised. Beyond the registration itself, the company must retain copies of supporting identity documents (passports, identity cards, share register extracts) for the entire duration of the interest and for ten years after the beneficial owner’s departure (Bexio, 17 September 2026).
Entities incorporated before 1 October 2026 benefit from staggered transition periods based on their audit type:
| Company type | Audit type | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| SA subject to ordinary audit | Ordinary | 31 December 2026 |
| Sàrl subject to ordinary audit | Ordinary | 31 January 2027 |
| SA not subject to ordinary audit | Other | 28 February 2027 |
| Sàrl not subject to ordinary audit | Other | 31 March 2027 |
| Other entities | Standard | 30 September 2028 |
Wilful non-compliance can trigger fines of up to CHF 500,000 (Fedlex, LTPM). Two categories of companies are exempt: listed companies and subsidiaries held at least 75% by a listed parent.
The ERP Angle: A New Data Stream to Manage
For SMEs running an ERP or business management platform, the LTPM introduces a new data flow to maintain. The filing itself is done on EasyGov.swiss, but the upstream steps — gathering shareholder information, updating records on ownership changes, and retaining supporting documents for ten years — directly affect legal management, document management (DMS), and accounting modules.
Bexio, one of the leading cloud software providers for Swiss SMEs, has published a detailed LTPM guide to help its users navigate the process (Bexio, 17 September 2026). At the time of writing, no major ERP vendor had announced a native EasyGov connector: compliance remains a manual process that finance and legal teams must manage themselves.
What to Watch
Entities incorporated after 1 October 2026 must file immediately, with no transition period. For existing companies, the first deadlines fall as early as end-2026 for SAs subject to ordinary audit. Any subsequent change in the shareholder structure — share transfers, inheritance, holding reorganisation — will trigger a new update obligation. Monitoring the roadmaps of Swiss ERP vendors for EasyGov integrations will therefore be worthwhile in the months ahead.
For further reading on regulatory and document compliance challenges in Switzerland, see our analysis of the BSI-Sikom acquisition impact on Swiss ERP and CRM and our guide on ERP data archiving: legal obligations and technical strategy.
