Resources
A glossary for regulated Swiss finance automation.
Plain-language definitions of the reporting, regulatory, and AI terms we use across the site.
- FINMA-aware AI
- AI built to the expectations a FINMA-regulated institution operates under: data with Swiss residency, an auditable record of every step that influences a regulated process, and a human who owns the sign-off. It is a configuration, not a product label.
- Fund factsheet automation
- The automated generation of fund factsheets (the periodic one- or two-page summaries of a fund's performance, holdings, and key data) from a stable template and refreshed data, replacing a manual, multi-day production cycle.
- Investment foundation (Anlagestiftung)
- A Swiss occupational-pension investment vehicle that pools assets from pension funds across investment groups. Investment foundations run regular reporting cycles across many investment groups and are supervised accordingly.
- Fund management company (Fondsleitung)
- A FINMA-licensed entity that administers Swiss collective investment schemes, responsible for fund accounting, valuation, and investor reporting.
- Asset manager (Vermögensverwalter)
- A firm that manages portfolios on behalf of clients. In Switzerland, asset managers are FINMA-supervised and carry reporting and disclosure obligations.
- Owned reporting vs. outsourced reporting
- Owned reporting lives in the institution's own environment, on tools it licenses, and can be run and changed without a vendor. Outsourced reporting is a third-party platform that produces the reports for a recurring fee and retains control of the data and format.
- Swiss data residency
- Keeping data physically and legally within Switzerland. For regulated institutions it constrains where AI and reporting systems may process and store data.
- Performance reporting
- The calculation and presentation of a fund's returns over defined periods, including benchmarks and attribution, for investors and regulators.
- Net asset value (NAV) reporting
- Reporting of a fund's net asset value (the value of its assets less liabilities, per share), which underpins factsheets, performance figures, and investor statements.
- ESG reporting
- The roll-up and disclosure of environmental, social, and governance metrics for a fund or portfolio, increasingly required alongside financial reporting.
- AI audit
- A structured review of an institution's workflows that identifies where AI and automation pay off, delivered as a prioritized roadmap that ends in deployed systems.
- AI Consultation & Assessment
- A structured review of a financial company's workflows that produces a prioritized automation roadmap: which manual work is worth automating, what it costs today, and in what order to fix it. The universal entry point for an AI engagement.
- Speed-to-lead
- The time between a new lead arriving and the first contact with them. Responding within minutes rather than hours measurably raises conversion, which is why financial sales teams automate the first response.
- Lead reactivation
- The systematic re-engagement of dormant CRM contacts (past inquiries, unconverted quotes, lapsed customers) with compliance-cleared outreach, turning a database a company already paid for into a second source of pipeline.
- Reporting pipeline
- The end-to-end chain from source data to delivered report (integration, calculation, template, and scheduled output), built once and run automatically.
- KGAST
- The Konferenz der Geschäftsführer von Anlagestiftungen, the industry body of Swiss investment foundations. Its self-regulatory guidelines standardize, among other things, how investment groups calculate and publish performance so that figures are comparable across foundations. Reporting for an investment foundation is typically built to these conventions.
- Investment group (Anlagegruppe)
- The individual pooled portfolios inside an investment foundation, each with its own investment guidelines, NAV, and performance record — comparable to a fund within an umbrella structure. Pension funds invest in investment groups rather than in the foundation itself, and each group runs its own reporting cycle.
- Standortbestimmung
- The Swiss-German term for a structured status assessment: establishing where an institution actually stands before committing to a direction. Applied to AI and automation, it maps current workflows, data flows, and manual effort, and returns a prioritized view of what is worth automating first. In regulated Swiss usage it is the preferred term for this exercise, since "Audit" carries a formal regulatory meaning.
- Auditable reporting
- Reporting in which every published figure can be traced back to its source data, calculation, and version — who changed what, when, and on which data state. For FINMA-regulated institutions this traceability is what allows an automated report to withstand scrutiny from auditors and supervisors; it is a property of the pipeline, not of a document format.
- Fund accounting (Fondsbuchhaltung)
- The bookkeeping of a fund: recording transactions, valuing positions, accruing income and expenses, and computing the NAV per share. Fund accounting is the system of record most reporting draws from — factsheets, performance figures, and investor statements sit downstream of it, so its data quality sets the ceiling for everything published.
- Total Expense Ratio (TER)
- A fund's total operating costs over a period, expressed as a percentage of its average net assets. The TER appears on factsheets and in fund documents and is calculated to published industry conventions so that costs are comparable across funds. Because it depends on accruals from fund accounting, it is one of the figures a reporting pipeline recomputes every period.
- Collective investment schemes (kollektive Kapitalanlagen)
- Pooled investment vehicles — funds in the broad sense — governed in Switzerland by the Collective Investment Schemes Act (CISA/KAG) and supervised by FINMA. The legal category determines who may manage a vehicle, what must be published about it, and how often; most Swiss fund reporting obligations follow from it.
- BVV 2
- The Swiss ordinance on occupational pension provision, whose investment provisions define the asset categories and limits within which pension assets may be invested. Reporting to pension funds and within investment foundations typically shows allocations against BVV 2 categories, which makes that classification logic part of the reporting pipeline itself.
- Publication requirements (Publikationspflichten)
- The disclosure duties attached to a regulated fund: prospectuses and key information documents, annual and semi-annual reports, and the ongoing publication of prices and material changes, each in prescribed form and through prescribed channels. They define the fixed calendar a reporting operation must keep, regardless of team size.
- Performance attribution
- The decomposition of a portfolio's return relative to its benchmark into the decisions that produced it — typically allocation, selection, and currency effects. Attribution turns a single performance number into an explanation, and because it combines holdings, benchmark, and FX data, it is one of the more data-hungry sections of a periodic report.
- Investment guidelines (Anlagerichtlinien)
- The binding rules that govern what a fund, investment group, or mandate may hold: permitted instruments, quality requirements, and concentration limits. Compliance with the guidelines is checked continuously and reported periodically — a breach must be visible, dated, and explained, which makes guideline monitoring a natural candidate for automated checks.
- AMAS guidelines
- Self-regulatory guidelines of the Asset Management Association Switzerland, several of which are recognized by FINMA as minimum standards for the Swiss fund industry — covering, among other things, how key figures such as the TER are calculated and how fund data is presented. Reports built for the Swiss market are expected to follow these conventions as a matter of course.
- Reporting cut-off date (Stichtag)
- The reference date as of which every figure in a report is drawn — typically month-, quarter-, or year-end. All sources feeding the report must be consistent as of that date; much of the reconciliation effort in manual reporting goes into making differently timed data agree on a single Stichtag.
- Data supply chain (Datenlieferkette)
- The chain of sources a report depends on — custodian statements, fund accounting extracts, market and benchmark data, ESG feeds — and the handoffs between them. Every handoff is a point where delay or error can enter; automating a report largely means formalizing this chain so each input arrives validated, on schedule, and in a known format.