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Gabriel Kurland This article was authored by Gabriel Kurland, managing director at Montfort Funds, a FINMA licensed representative for foreign funds in Switzerland.

Want to get your piece of the € 571 billion Swiss pension funds’ assets? Show me your Swiss representative first!

In September 2012, Switzerland adopted a new law to regulate its prosperous but mostly unregulated financial industry. The law triggered the revision of two documents defining the distribution of collective investment schemes in Switzerland. Those documents are known as the Collective Investment Scheme Act ("CISA") and the Collective Investment Ordinance ("CISO"). CISA and CISO entered into force on March 1st, 2013.

The major change has been the replacement of the private placement regime by a regulated distribution framework. Practically, the new law extended the regulated activity to the distribution to "qualified investors". Hedge funds, private equity funds and other alternative investment funds have suddenly been brought into scope and obliged to comply in order to continue raising assets from Swiss investors. The two years transitional period granted for getting compliant will end on February 28th, 2015.

After having been through the complexity of the AIFMD, investment managers will find the steps to comply with the Swiss law to be quite straightforward. Indeed, for managers targeting only qualified investors, no registration i......................

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