Finance
Swiss upper house backs motion capping bankers' pay
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on March 11, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 24, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on March 11, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 24, 2026
The Swiss upper house voted to cap bankers' annual pay at 3-5 million francs, a move following Credit Suisse's collapse. The motion now goes to the lower house.
ZURICH (Reuters) - The Swiss upper house of parliament late on Monday narrowly backed a motion to limit bankers' total annual compensation to between 3 and 5 million Swiss francs ($3.4-5.7 million), a sum significantly below what the best-paid earn today.
By a vote of 21 in favour and 19 against, the measure initially proposed following the 2023 collapse of Credit Suisse now moves to the lower house of parliament.
If the plan clears the lower house, Switzerland's ruling Federal Council must draft an amendment to change the law. The council had rejected the motion in 2023.
Whatever amendment the Federal Council drafts would then return to parliament, which is working on a raft of measures aimed at making the banking sector less risky.
How well remunerated executives should be in Switzerland has become a bigger issue since the demise of Credit Suisse, which dealt a serious blow to the country's reputation for business excellence and banking stability.
Following a state-engineered rescue, Credit Suisse was acquired by UBS, whose chief executive Sergio Ermotti had a pay package worth 14.4 million Swiss francs in 2023.
Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter later questioned the sums that some top executives earned, naming Ermotti.
($1 = 0.8797 Swiss francs)
(Reporting by Dave Graham and Oliver Hirt, Editing by Friederike Heine)
The article discusses the Swiss upper house's motion to cap bankers' pay following the collapse of Credit Suisse.
The pay cap is proposed to address concerns about high executive compensation and banking sector risk after Credit Suisse's collapse.
Credit Suisse was acquired by UBS in a state-engineered rescue.
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