Center for Financial Market Regulation

The University Research Priority Program Financial Market Regulation (URPP FinReg) of Zurich University start-ed on 1 January 2013. At the time, the global financial crisis (incl. the rescue operation of UBS in 2008) had caused a political debate about stricter regulation of financial markets which are economically significant for Switzerland and particularly for Zurich as a financial center. From its beginning, this URPP has aimed to exam-ine existing regulatory concepts and approaches in the light of their history and international rulebooks. In addi-tion, it further intended to analyse national as well as international regulatory needs and proposals. During its 12-year term, the members of the URPP Financial Market Regulation have contributed their expertise at national and international levels. In this respect, they could for example, bring their knowledge into the political debate in the creation of four important reform laws in Switzerland: the Financial Market Infrastructure Act, the Financial Institutions Act, the Financial Services Act and the Distributed Ledger Technology Act. In total, the URPP has organized well over 100 events and conferences. It advised supervisory authorities and the legislator and was involved in the investigation of the Credit Suisse crisis.

Throughout its time, the URPP invested a large portion of its funds in academic career development. The pro-motion of young researchers has been very successful, as six assistant professorships have been created, four postdocs supported, and in all 35 doctoral theses have been successfully concluded. In view of global developments and education demands, the URPP has set up successfully one new course on capital market law in the Master’s programme as well as two continuing education courses CAS programmes on financial mar-ket law topics. The CAS “Finanzmarktrecht” was established in 2013 and is still being run by the Faculty of Law. The CAS “Wealth Management” was established in 2017 and ran until 2023.  These continuing education pro-grammes are targeted at practitioners from the financial industry, law firms and tax advisors, and thus contrib-ute to the successful expansion of the University’s constantly growing continuing education programs for law-yers in recent years. The state of the banking sector, incl. the collapse of the Credit Suisse in 2023, has shown that financial market regulation remains a very important topic of high relevance. The activities of this URPP will be consolidated and continued as a “Center for Financial Market Regulation” from 2025 onwards, under the leadership of Thorsten Hens (Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics), Rolf Sethe (Faculty of Law) and Aline Darbellay (Faculty of Law).