Reporting an incident to FINMA or filing a complaint

Who can submit a report?

Persons suspecting breaches of financial market regulations or other irregularities at FINMA-supervised institutions and with an inside perspective of the institution concerned (e.g. as a current or former employee, body or agent).

If you have an outside perspective of the institution concerned (e.g. as a client), please submit your report using the form “Reporting an incident to FINMA or filing a complaint” to be found on the FINMA website https://www.finma.ch/en/finma-public/reporting-information/

For general enquiries, please contact the FINMA hotline (+41 31 327 98 88) or email questions@finma.ch.

When can I submit a report?

Before you submit a report to FINMA, please note that according to case law for permitted whistleblowing you are obliged first of all to report the suspected irregularity within the institution concerned. Only if this is not successful or appears futile is an external report to FINMA as the supervisory authority justified (so-called cascade system of permitted whistleblowing). You otherwise run the risk by submitting your report to FINMA of being liable to prosecution due to a potential breach of your duty of confidentiality.

Which reports assist FINMA?

Reports of potential or actual breaches of financial market regulations to be upheld by the institutions and persons supervised by FINMA and reports about other irregularities among the institutions and persons supervised by FINMA. Financial market regulations are to be found in particular in the Financial Market Supervision Act (FINMASA) and in the various financial market legislation, in the implementing ordinances issued by the Federal Government and FINMA and in the FINMA circulars. Further details of FINMA’s activities can be found on the FINMA website https://www.finma.ch/en/

Please note that FINMA is in particular not responsible for the assessment of civil law disputes between supervised institutions and their (former) employees and cannot offer any legal advice.

What is the procedure for submitting a report and how can I set up a postbox?

If you wish to submit a report, please click on the “Submit report” button at the top of our introduction page.

The reporting procedure comprises three steps:

1. You are first asked to read a text informing you of the protection of your anonymity and to answer a security query.
2. On the reporting page you are guided through a catalogue of questions with a choice of answers and can then draft your tip-off in your own words. You have 5,000 characters available for your free text, which is equivalent to one complete page. You can also send a file with up to 5 MB to support your report. Please remember that documents can contain information about the author. After submitting your report, you will receive a reference number as proof that you have submitted this report.
3. You are then asked to set up your own secured postbox. You can use this to receive feedback from us and answer any questions that remain open or supplement your report. If you already have a secured postbox, you can access it directly via the “Login” button. You will also first have to confirm the security query for this.

As long as you do not enter any data yourself that can allow conclusions to be drawn about your person, the BKMS^® system will protect your anonymity from a technical point of view.

How can I receive feedback but still remain anonymous?

The overriding principle of the BKMS^® system used here is the technical protection of the whistleblower. The function permitting a report to be submitted without disclosing your identity is independently certified.

When setting up your secured postbox, you select your own pseudonym/user name and password. This login data is visible to nobody except yourself. Should you lose your login data, please submit a new report and set up a new postbox. If possible, please quote the reference number of your old report. As this is a new postbox, the contents of your old report will not be shown here.

If you submit your report anonymously, you do not have to disclose any personal details. Your report will be kept anonymous by means of encryption and other special security routines. If you wish to remain anonymous, do not enter any data that could allow conclusions to be drawn about your person. Please also bear in mind that your employer may be authorised to conduct evaluations specifically on the devices and services it provides (e.g. Internet).

FINMA can ask you questions via the secured postbox if any details should still be unclear. You will also remain anonymous during the dialogue.