UBS Group Chair Colm Kelleher said Switzerland’s financial regulator and central bank set out additional capital requirements that would lead to a 50% increase compared with current levels, the Wall Street Journal reported. Swiss authorities have been working over the past year to reform of the country’s “too big to fail” banking laws in the wake of Credit Suisse’s rescue takeover by UBS, a move that is widely expected to result in higher capital demands for UBS.

Swiss inflation remained unchanged in March, though the impact of U.S. tariffs threaten to roil the country’s economy and push the Swiss National Bank to cut rates further, the Wall Street Journal reported. Annual inflation stayed at 0.3%, the same as February, matching the lowest level in almost four years, Switzerland’s federal statistics office said Thursday. Trends from increased package-holiday and clothing prices contrasted with declining energy and accommodation prices, it said.

One of Switzerland's main political parties could soon propose capping UBS's investment banking activities as part of a regulatory overhaul aimed at making the sector less risky, a senior lawmaker said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), the biggest group in parliament, would pitch the plan as soon as possible if the government proposed that UBS fully capitalize its foreign units, SVP lawmaker Thomas Matter said. Limiting the investment bank could be a way of reducing the amount of extra capital UBS would need to hold, he said.

In the year since Stefan Walter has been in charge of Switzerland’s financial regulator, he’s made a name for himself among the bankers he oversees, Bloomberg News reported. They call him “The Sheriff.” Walter, 60, a German citizen with decades of experience in top-level regulation including in the US, is using a tumultuous period in Swiss finance to establish a forthright, public presence for Finma that few in Zurich or Geneva are accustomed to.

Switzerland’s central bank lowered its key interest for a fifth straight meeting of its policy makers, while its Swedish counterpart left rates unchanged Thursday for the first time since mid-2024, the Wall Street Journal reported. Economists expect both central banks to leave their key rates unchanged over coming months. Both have moved rapidly to remove the restraints they placed on economic activity as they sought to tame an inflation surge in 2022 and 2023.

Weaknesses in the capital regime for the Swiss banking sector still need to be addressed after the 2023 collapse of Credit Suisse, the Swiss National Bank said on Tuesday, backing government efforts to make the industry more robust, Reuters reported. Switzerland has pledged to introduce stricter banking regulations in response to the demise of Credit Suisse, which was subsequently taken over by its old rival UBS. At the centre of proposals set out by the government last year is that UBS should hold more capital to make it more robust and prevent a repeat of the Credit Suisse meltdown.

Switzerland’s inflation rate edged down in the final month of 2024, reinforcing the Swiss central bank’s decision to cut its key rate for the fourth-straight meeting last month, the Wall Street Journal reported. Consumer prices were 0.6% higher in December than the same month of 2023, down from the annual inflation rate of 0.7% posted in November, the country’s statistics agency said Tuesday. December’s rate was the same as October’s level, which was the lowest since June 2021.