Genf: Horizont 2035: die Herausforderungen für den Finanzplatz

Horizont 2035: die Herausforderungen für den Finanzplatz – ein Teil des Buches «Genf als internationaler Finanzplatz» von Dr. Alexander Ressos.

Horizon 2035: the challenges facing the financial centre

The ten preceding parts have retraced five centuries of history and described the current workings of the Geneva financial centre. Part K turns to the future, with the caution that the exercise demands. Without predicting anything, it identifies the open questions of 2026 whose outcome will determine what the financial centre will be in 2035, at the horizon of a decade that today’s decisions already commit. Six challenges have been selected. The first concerns crypto-assets, for which the Swiss legal framework was one of the first in the world and whose tokenisation of traditional assets could transform the infrastructure of the financial centre. The second is sustainable finance, which within ten years has become a criterion of competitiveness and a field of regulation, and the third is international competition, in which Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Luxembourg contest Geneva’s traditional functions. Then come technology and artificial intelligence, which are redefining the professions described in Part J, and relations with the European Union, where the package signed in March 2026 sets the framework for the coming decade without settling the question of financial services. The chapter closes with scenarios that combine these challenges.

The method remains that of the book. Each chapter starts from established facts, cites its sources, distinguishes the verified from the plausible, and ends with a summary in five sentences and a checklist. The author has endeavoured not to confuse his preferences with his forecasts. A financial centre is not a project that one directs. It is an ecosystem that one tends, and about which its players, the authorities and the public decide together, often without consulting one another. The challenges described here are those on which these decisions are being taken at this moment.

One thread links these challenges to the preceding parts: trust. The medieval fairs sold transactional security; the Protestant Bank sold the reliability of a network; modern private banking sold discretion and then, after the end of bank client secrecy, competence and compliance; commodity trading sells the organisation of flows. Crypto-assets and Digital Assets, sustainable finance, technology and international relations each pose the same question in a new form: in what respect will the world, in 2035, be willing to place its trust in Geneva?

About the book

This part belongs to Geneva as an International Financial Centre by Dr Alexander Ressos, published here in full, section by section.