Ability of foreign financial market supervisory authorities to provide administrative assistance
Article 42c FINMASA enables supervised institutions to transmit non-public information to foreign authorities and entities without having to obtain official authorisation. FINMA has defined its interpretation of Article 42c FINMASA in Circular 2017/6 Direct transmission to assist supervised institutions in implementing the statutory provision uniformly and autonomously and to safeguard FINMA's supervisory interests.
In accordance with Margin no. 20 of the Circular 2017/6, FINMA publishes a list of foreign authorities regarding which supervised institutions may assume that they meet the requirements of confidentiality and specialty, as long as there are no indications to the contrary.
The list contains foreign supervisory authorities:
- to which FINMA has provided administrative assistance in the past;
- in respect of which it has been ruled by a court that they essentially meet the conditions of specialty and confidentiality or met them in a specific case at the time the decision was made; or
- with which FINMA has concluded a bilateral cooperation agreement that is sufficient for purposes of administrative assistance.
The goal of Art. 42c FINMASA is the efficient, direct exchange of information between supervised institutions and foreign authorities/entities. FINMA is accordingly reluctant to make use of the possibility to reserve administrative assistance (in 2017-2020, it reserved administrative assistance only 14 times).
