Raiffeisen Switzerland

The Raiffeisen Group concentrates on the Swiss market, and almost half of the Swiss population relies on a Raiffeisen bank for pensions, investments, housing and financing. Corporate clients use the banks for loans and payments, for interest rate, currency and precious metals trading, and for capital market and corporate finance services. More than 12,000 people work for the group in all regions of Switzerland.

In 2025, the mortgage loans of the group grew by 4.6 percent to CHF 230.9 billion, which gave Raiffeisen a market share of 18.4 percent in Swiss mortgages. For the first half of 2026, the group reported a profit of CHF 659.3 million, customer deposits of CHF 228.7 billion and about 45,000 newly opened securities accounts. Basil Heeb has chaired the board of directors of Raiffeisen Switzerland since 19 June 2026, and Gabriel Brenna chairs its executive board.

Raiffeisen Rio is the digital wealth management service of the Raiffeisen banks. A client answers a few questions, and Rio derives a risk profile and builds a globally diversified core portfolio of equities and bonds. Since 21 April 2026, clients can add cryptocurrencies, gold and real estate to that core portfolio as focus themes, and the minimum investment for Rio dropped from CHF 5,000 to CHF 500. Each focus theme receives a weight of five percent of the invested capital.

For the cryptocurrency focus theme, Rio keeps the five percent quota within a band of 2.5 percentage points in either direction through automatic purchases and sales. The bank holds the crypto assets as custody assets in the securities account, so wallet functions such as peer-to-peer payments are not available. Raiffeisen states that it has no investment opinion on cryptocurrencies and gives no recommendations on them. In April 2026, Raiffeisen also introduced round-up saving, which rounds up payments with the Raiffeisen debit card or Raiffeisen TWINT and invests the difference in a fund savings plan or in Rio.

On 8 April 2026, Raiffeisen launched a sandbox for a Swiss franc stablecoin together with the bank UBS, the Swiss Post subsidiary PostFinance and the digital asset bank Sygnum. Zürcher Kantonalbank, BCV and Swiss Stablecoin AG, which supplies the technical infrastructure for issuing the stablecoin, belonged to the initiative from the start. A sandbox is a live environment with protective limits, such as a restricted group of participants and caps on amounts, in which the partners test use cases before any market decision.

On 8 September 2026, the partners started the test phase and welcomed SIX and TWINT as new partners, which brought the initiative to nine Swiss companies. The tests use CHFD, a stablecoin pegged one to one to the Swiss franc, which has been technically live in the sandbox since the end of June 2026. CHFD Infrastruktur AG, a subsidiary of Swiss Stablecoin AG, runs the platform on which the use cases are tried out. Besides automated transactions between financial institutions and the tokenized settlement of digital assets, the partners test programmable payments that could reduce fraud on online marketplaces, give fair access to event tickets or speed up payouts by public authorities. The test phase is planned to run until the end of 2026, and the partners will publish an overview of the results afterwards.

Since 20 August 2024, all private and corporate clients with e-banking access can send and receive instant payments, and Raiffeisen was one of the first Swiss banks to offer sending as well as receiving. An instant payment reaches the account of the recipient within ten seconds, around the clock on 365 days a year, in Swiss francs between Swiss accounts and up to CHF 20,000 per payment. At the launch, Raiffeisen processed more than 180 million payments a year through its e-banking, and more than 66 percent of e-banking logins came from mobile devices.

SIX Group, the operator of the Swiss stock exchange, belongs to about 150 banks, and Raiffeisen holds a stake of 5.5 percent in it. Raiffeisen obtains several services from SIX, among them the processing of domestic payments through the Swiss Interbank Clearing system SIC, card transactions and electronic invoices. The group also holds 4 percent of TWINT AG, the company behind the Swiss mobile payment app.

On 21 May 2026, Raiffeisen Switzerland placed its first digital bail-in bond on the Swiss capital market, with a volume of CHF 200 million and a coupon of 1.44 percent. The bond runs for seven years with an early call option after six years, and it has traded on SIX Swiss Exchange under ISIN CH1537606795 since 22 June 2026. The digital bond has the same legal status and the same rating as a traditional bail-in bond of Raiffeisen Switzerland, and its minimum denomination of CHF 100,000 limits it to institutional and professional investors.

Bail-in bonds build up loss-absorbing funds, which Raiffeisen needs under the Swiss rules for systemically important banks. Raiffeisen Switzerland acted as the lead manager of the transaction itself, and Fitch was expected to rate the bond A.

Raiffeisen in Switzerland is a group of 208 cooperative banks and their joint cooperative Raiffeisen Switzerland, which leads the group from St. Gallen. Anyone who buys a share certificate of a Raiffeisen bank becomes a member, and each member has only one vote, regardless of the number of share certificates. Raiffeisen has provided banking services in Switzerland since 1900, and the priest Johann Evangelist Traber founded the first Swiss Raiffeisen savings bank in Bichelsee in the canton of Thurgau.

Clients of the Raiffeisen banks invest in cryptocurrencies through the focus theme of the same name in Raiffeisen Rio, which starts at an investment of CHF 500. The focus theme holds five percent of the invested capital, and the bank keeps the crypto assets in the securities account of the client, without the functions of a wallet.

Raiffeisen TWINT has been available for download since 30 May 2017 and debits payments directly from the bank account of the client. TWINT is the Swiss payment app for online shops, stores and money transfers between friends, and Raiffeisen owns 4 percent of TWINT AG.

Raiffeisen Switzerland has its headquarters at Raiffeisenplatz 4 in 9001 St. Gallen, in the east of Switzerland. From St. Gallen, Raiffeisen Switzerland runs treasury, trading and transaction functions for the whole group in the role of a central bank for the 208 Raiffeisen banks.

In May 2025, the Economic Research team of Raiffeisen Switzerland published a study on AI in practice, which found that Swiss companies rarely use artificial intelligence in a systematic way. The study names energy saving, quality control and order processing as fields where AI already delivers a concrete benefit, for example cameras that check production quality or systems that read e-mail orders automatically.