You are not required to report. Your largest customer is.
Many mid-sized companies reassure themselves with an entirely correct formal argument: not listed, below the thresholds, therefore not affected. Legally, that is often true. Operationally, it is a dangerous shortcut.
Regulation in an economy based on division of labour does not operate only where it starts. It affects large companies directly and everyone else through the supply chain. A group required to disclose emissions, energy and supply-chain data cannot invent it. It obtains that information from its suppliers and documents who provided it and who did not. [Evidence: status of Swiss climate-reporting regulation and the impact of EU rules on SMEs]
A rule that does not apply to you therefore becomes a line in the next tender form. At that point, it is no longer a question of attitude but of your ability to supply. A company unable to provide the data may be removed from the shortlist before price or quality is discussed. That is the quietest way to lose a customer: you never even learn that you were in the running.
The time horizon is crucial and routinely underestimated. A machine purchased today will still be on the factory floor in eight years and will then produce the figures you must disclose. A vehicle ordered today will shape the fleet’s footprint well into the 2030s. Investment decisions are therefore always reporting decisions as well, although that becomes visible only later.
The practical conclusion is that ESG and liquidity planning belong in the same discussion. When separated, the long-term argument regularly loses to the short-term one. When considered together, it often becomes clear that the more sustainable option is not more expensive over its useful life but needs to be financed differently.
A supplier uses leasing to invest in energy-efficient production because a major customer requires CO₂ data. The investment pays off through energy savings, order retention and reporting capability at the same time.
Has a customer already asked you for such data, and how long did the answer take?
Author: Malte
The AI pilot is the easy part.
A convincing demonstration can now be built in an afternoon. Summarise a document. Draft an email. Analyse a spreadsheet. Put a chatbot on a handful of PDFs.
Then the difficult phase begins: productive operation.
A recent Swiss survey makes the gap visible. Fifty five per cent of companies already use AI deliberately in at least one business area. Thirty one per cent remain in the pilot phase. Only 9 per cent report that AI has changed their business model. Swiss SME Portal
The obstacle is no longer access to technology. It is the organisation around it.
Which data are reliable? Which processes may be automated? Where must a person approve the result? Who monitors quality? Which systems are connected? Which roles need new skills? How will economic value be measured?
Infrastructure comes next. According to the same survey, data quality and data silos are among the biggest barriers. Security and data protection concerns follow close behind.
That may make 2026 the year after the first wave of AI enthusiasm. The technology now has to enter real processes, and that costs money. Sixty four per cent of Swiss CFOs surveyed by Deloitte accordingly expect technology and IT spending to rise. Swiss SME Portal
A pilot answers whether the technology can do something. Scaling answers a harder question: Can our company use it reliably, securely and economically?
Sustainability in SMEs rarely fails because of conviction. It fails because of timing.
Most entrepreneurs I speak with have no fundamental problem with sustainability. Their problem is that the bill arrives immediately while the benefit trickles in over years, in a year when every franc is already counted twice.
That creates a common reflex: ESG is declared a programme. It comes with a strategy, workshop, roadmap, external support and a budget that must eventually be requested. It is then postponed because a programme always looks more expensive than an individual decision. That is not refusal. It is budget logic.
The pragmatic route works in precisely the opposite direction. In mid-sized businesses, sustainability is created not in the strategy paper but in procurement: with the next machine, vehicle, building technology or IT renewal. Each decision will arise anyway. The real question is not whether to decide, but which criteria apply.
That also changes the calculation. An energy-efficient installation is not an additional expense for a report. It is an investment reflected in the energy and maintenance budget. The ESG effect becomes a by-product of a commercial decision, and is robust for precisely that reason.
The pressure does not primarily come from legislators but from the value chain: banks, large customers and tenders that require emissions data. [Evidence: KPMG or PwC survey on ESG requirements for Swiss SMEs] Companies unable to provide it lose orders before price is even discussed.
The financing structure determines whether this route is viable. If every more sustainable option must be paid as a cash premium, the cheaper purchase will often win. If it is spread over predictable instalments, it is measured against operating cost savings, and the result often looks different.
A construction company leases lower-emission equipment and improves both operating costs and its ability to compete in tenders. No programme. One procurement decision.
A provocative question for the room: do SMEs really need an ESG strategy, or simply better procurement criteria?
We are recruiting skilled workers for tasks we could have eliminated long ago.
The debate about skills shortages focuses almost entirely on recruitment: advertisements, salaries, employer branding, training and immigration. All correct, necessary and well documented. [Evidence: current skilled-labour shortage index or SECO labour-market data]
The other half of the answer receives much less attention. When people are scarce, what matters is not only how many the company finds, but how much of their time genuinely creates value and how much is lost to searching, waiting, duplicate entry, setup processes, rework and unplanned journeys.
In many companies, a double-digit percentage of working time is lost this way. That is not employee negligence but the result of processes and tools that evolved separately and were never considered together. Each friction point is too small to fix on its own. Together, they amount to a position the company would not need to fill.
Modern equipment, digital scheduling, properly equipped vehicles and ergonomic tools therefore work twice. They increase output per employee without requiring anyone to work faster, an important distinction often lost in the productivity debate. And they change how the workplace feels.
That creates an uncomfortable budget issue: investment in tools is investment in employer quality. We simply do not account for it that way. It therefore competes with other capital expenditure rather than with the cost of an unfilled position. That cost is substantial: overtime, declined orders, pressure on the existing team and months of recruitment effort.
Combining the two calculations produces different decisions. Financing also helps: a monthly instalment can be compared directly with the capacity gained. A one-off investment, by contrast, enters a budget pot where it loses against everything else.
An installation company leases modern vehicles and digital scheduling tools so its technicians spend less time in the office and more time with customers.
How many hours a week does your best team lose to avoidable friction, and what would one fewer position be worth?
The strong franc may be the oldest productivity programme in the Swiss economy.
It requires no grant application, no project office and no regard for the annual budget.
In a recent Deloitte survey, 68 per cent of Swiss CFOs identify the strong franc as a burden on margins. Labour costs follow at 58 per cent and energy and raw material prices at 51 per cent. Swiss SME Portal
Swissmem likewise identifies the strong franc, US tariffs and weak export markets as major challenges for Switzerland’s technology industries this year. Swissmem
An export oriented SME has limited influence over any of these forces. It cannot weaken the franc, abolish a US tariff or dictate world market prices.
It can influence its own productivity. How many working hours go into one unit? How much energy? How much scrap, downtime and administration?
That is why investment in automation and modern equipment is not a luxury reserved for good times. It can be a response to structural margin pressure.
Every investment still needs a sound calculation. But the benchmark should not be the purchase price alone. It should include the cost of the existing process.
Swiss companies will rarely win internationally through the lowest wages. They win through quality, innovation and productivity.
The strong franc simply makes that truth more visible.
The term is the most underestimated variable in an investment decision.
Prices are negotiated, interest rates debated and specifications contested for weeks. The term is simply entered. Usually as long as possible, because that lowers the monthly instalment and makes the application easier to approve.
For Swiss SMEs with international business, that is the wrong optimisation. When trade policy decisions can change calculations within weeks and sales markets must be reassessed, a ten-year planning horizon is not a plan. It is an assumption dressed as a forecast. [Evidence: current tariff and trade situation for Swiss exporters, SECO or Swissmem]
The term determines something that appears in no investment proposal: how quickly a company can adapt capacity to a changed market. That makes it a strategic variable rather than a pure financing detail. The same applies to residual values and return points. They determine what a misjudgement actually costs and whether it can be corrected at all.
The uncomfortable consequence is that the lowest instalment is not automatically the best solution. A shorter term costs more per month but may prove significantly cheaper in retrospect because it allowed the company to adapt. SMEs practically never price these option values. The financial industry does little else.
This leads to a different conversation with the financing partner. Not: what is the lowest instalment over eight years? But: what term fits the cycle of this order, this market and this technology? And what happens if the order is not renewed after three years?
Those who ask these questions in advance negotiate structure. Those who ask them afterwards negotiate damage control.
A supplier leases additional production capacity for a fixed-term major order instead of permanently tying up capital in excess capacity. When the order ends, the obligation ends with it. That is not a financing trick. It reflects the economic reality in the contract.
A question for everyone with export exposure: how long are you currently committed, and was that a deliberate decision or the result of optimising the instalment?
Diversification is one of those words almost everyone supports until the bill arrives.
When an export market becomes more difficult, the recommendation comes quickly: enter new markets. Correct, but those markets do not appear for free.
The current environment for Swiss exporters is demanding. In the first quarter of 2026, Swiss exports fell by 4.2 per cent after seasonal adjustment to CHF 66.9 billion. Exports to North America dropped sharply. Exports to the United States were 15.6 per cent below the previous quarter. Swiss SME Portal
Since 24 July, new US tariffs have applied to numerous Swiss goods. SECO
Diversification is therefore sensible. It also needs capital.
A new market may require different certifications, products, packaging, logistics, inventory, sales and service capacity. It may even require additional machinery.
Market diversification is therefore a balance sheet issue. A company that has committed all available liquidity to long lived assets has less strategic room to manoeuvre.
That does not mean ownership is wrong. It means capital commitment has a price that may become visible only when a new opportunity or a new constraint appears.
Diversification costs money. Concentration does too, only at a time no one can predict.
Entrepreneurs are not walking tax bases. Wealth is not a social offence. And a country does not become richer by driving away the people who create prosperity.
Yet economic success is increasingly discussed as if it required political justification.
Those who own a lot should pay more. Those who have built a business should pay again when they pass it on to the next generation. Anyone who objects is quickly put on the defensive.
The liberal counter-question is: What does a country actually lose when successful entrepreneurs and wealthy families leave?
The answer is: far more than tax revenue.
Entrepreneurial wealth is not a pile of cash
The wealth of a family entrepreneur rarely sits in a bank account.
It is tied up in companies, factories, machinery, patents, inventories and shareholdings. It is equity. It absorbs losses, supports borrowing and finances investment.
A wealth tax therefore does not automatically tax disposable luxury. It can tax capital that is working inside a business.
Switzerland is one of the few OECD countries that still levies a general wealth tax. Holdings in unlisted companies are generally part of taxable wealth, although cantons apply different valuation and relief rules. The OECD explicitly points out that wealth taxes can create liquidity problems where assets are illiquid.
The problem is simple: Taxes have to be paid in cash. Company values do not necessarily consist of cash.
Someone who owns a business worth CHF 50 million does not automatically have CHF 50 million in liquidity.
That distinction is surprisingly often lost in political debate.
Taxes change behaviour
Switzerland can measure this.
A study published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy analysed differences between Swiss cantons. Its finding: when a cantonal wealth tax rate falls by one percentage point, declared taxable wealth rises by at least 43 per cent after six years.
The researchers attribute around 24 per cent of the effect to taxpayer mobility and around 21 per cent to rising property prices. For a significant part of the remaining effect, they find evidence of changes in reporting behaviour.
The key lesson is not that every wealthy person leaves a canton after a tax increase.
It is much simpler:
People respond to taxes.
So does capital.
That is why Swiss tax competition is more than a marketing tool for locations. Cantons are free to raise or lower taxes. But they also have to live with the economic consequences.
Power is constrained.
That is federalism in its most economic form.
Norway shows how mobile entrepreneurs have become
Norway increased wealth taxation from 2022 onwards and subsequently tightened dividend taxation as well. In particular, the government increased the valuation of shareholdings for wealth-tax purposes and introduced a higher rate for large fortunes.
In the same year, according to Norwegian population registers, at least 30 wealthy entrepreneurs and investors deregistered and moved abroad. Switzerland was one of the most popular destinations.
Norway subsequently tightened its exit-tax regime. The reforms were designed in particular to prevent unrealised gains accumulated while a person was subject to Norwegian taxation from permanently escaping Norwegian tax after emigration.
One can take different views on the tax policy.
But the economic message is difficult to ignore:
When a country needs rules to determine how much wealth can still be taxed when people leave, mobility is no longer a theoretical risk.
France shows that the cost is more complicated than a tax bill
Until 2017, France imposed a broad wealth tax known as the ISF.
According to France Stratégie, between 2011 and 2016 an average of around 370 wealth-tax households returned to France each year. Around 950 left.
After the ISF was replaced by the more narrowly focused real-estate wealth tax, the IFI, the picture changed. Between 2018 and 2021, an average of around 380 households returned each year, while only around 260 left. France Stratégie explicitly cautions against drawing a simple causal conclusion from these figures. At the same time, the reform came at a substantial cost in direct tax revenue. For 2022, the difference was estimated at around EUR 4.5 billion.
That is precisely why the usual debate is too narrow.
The relevant question is not:
How much tax does an entrepreneur pay this year?
It is:
Where will that entrepreneur’s capital be in ten years? Where will the next generation start businesses? Where will the next company be created? Where will investments be made? Where will the family office be based? Where will a foundation be established?
Those effects never appear fully in short-term tax statistics.
The United Kingdom provides the necessary counter-example
A liberal argument should take its counter-examples seriously.
In 2017, the United Kingdom tightened the rules for long-term resident non-doms. A later HMRC evaluation found that the reform did indeed lead to additional departures. Long-term non-doms affected by the reform were 10 to 12 per cent more likely to emigrate.
Most nevertheless stayed.
And those who stayed paid substantially more tax. HMRC estimates additional revenues of around GBP 1 billion in both 2018/19 and 2019/20 compared with a scenario without the reform.
That disproves one simplistic claim:
Higher taxes do not automatically lead to lower tax revenues.
But it does not prove that mobility is irrelevant.
Since 6 April 2025, the United Kingdom has operated a fundamentally different system. The previous remittance basis was replaced by a residence-based regime with a special four-year rule for qualifying new residents.
The fiscal balance can be measured.
The long-term effect on investment, company formation and location decisions will be far harder to quantify.
Germany shows what lies behind the label “the wealthy”
Public debate likes to talk abstractly about “the rich”.
The structure of German business shows how misleading that can be.
According to a ZEW study published in 2025, 88 per cent of private companies in Germany are family-controlled. They employ 18.3 million people, accounting for 58 per cent of all private-sector employees.
Behind large private fortunes there are therefore often no anonymous financial portfolios.
There are companies.
Jobs.
Factories.
Suppliers.
Apprenticeships.
And owners who carry responsibility for decades.
Anyone discussing the taxation of large fortunes should therefore at least ask what exactly is being taxed.
The JUSO initiative made the conflict visible
The Swiss initiative “For a Social Climate Policy – Tax-Financed Fairly” proposed a federal inheritance and gift tax of 50 per cent on the portion of an estate or gift exceeding CHF 50 million.
On 30 November 2025, 78.28 per cent of voters rejected the initiative. Not a single canton voted in favour.
The debate around large family-owned companies highlighted the central problem of any tax based on substance:
The value of a company is not the same as available liquidity.
A large tax bill at the moment of succession can therefore affect liquidity, ownership structures or the financing of a company.
The OECD points to precisely this issue in the context of inheritance taxes on family businesses and notes that many countries therefore provide special rules.
That is not an argument for making inheritances tax-free as a matter of principle.
It is an argument against treating business assets as if they were cash sitting in a vault.
Entrepreneurs create more than companies
The contribution of wealthy entrepreneurs does not end at the factory gate.
Swiss entrepreneur Heinrich Gebert endowed the Gebert Rüf Foundation with CHF 220 million. By the end of 2025, the foundation had invested CHF 292.4 million directly in projects. According to its own evaluations, 35 per cent of the completed projects examined led to the creation of a start-up.
In Germany, the Robert Bosch Stiftung invested around EUR 195 million in health, education and global issues in 2025 alone. Since its creation, it has provided more than EUR 2.7 billion for charitable work.
These examples are not substitutes for taxation.
They illustrate that private wealth can generate social value without first passing through a government budget.
A pluralistic society consists of more than the state and the individual.
Between them stand companies, foundations, associations, universities, philanthropists, investors and private initiatives.
It is precisely this diversity that limits power.
Economic success is not a moral failing
This is where the real dividing line in the debate lies.
One can view wealth primarily as a distribution problem.
Or one can first ask how that wealth was created and what it makes possible.
Of course, wealth generated through corruption, fraud or political privilege deserves no special protection.
But in a market economy, substantial wealth is often created because someone starts a company, takes risks, creates jobs, invests and remains an owner for decades.
To then place the result under moral suspicion sends a peculiar message to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
The state can tax. It cannot legislate entrepreneurship into existence.
A state can tax income.
It can tax wealth.
It can tax inheritances.
It can tighten rules and invent new taxes.
What it cannot create by law are risk-taking, trust, owner responsibility and an entrepreneurial tradition.
From a liberal perspective, this does not imply a state without taxes.
It implies a restrained state that understands that its own economic foundation is created outside the state.
Legal certainty.
Property rights.
Predictable taxation.
Competition.
And respect for economic success.
The most important question for sensible location policy is therefore not:
How much more can we take from successful people?
It is:
What must we do to ensure that people who create companies, invest capital and assume responsibility still want to invest here tomorrow?
Because when they leave, a country may first lose a taxpayer.
Then perhaps an investor.
Then a decision-making centre.
Later, a foundation.
And eventually an entire generation of entrepreneurs.
Only the first loss ever appears on the tax bill.
Leave a CommentAXA is building a global AI hub and says an initial version is used across five entities. EIOPA reports that 65% of insurers in its survey already use generative AI and another 23% intend to. Those figures tell us how widely the technology has spread. They do not show whether any particular process now works better.
For a leasing company, I would count fewer agents and measure more work: time per application, errors in document checks, the quality of the credit memo and the time until a useful question reaches the customer.
Every pilot needs a baseline and a comparison. A draft produced in two minutes offers little benefit if correcting it takes twenty. Detecting missing documents early and reducing repeated requests would be a better outcome for customers and colleagues alike.
Scaling begins when speed and quality can be measured together.
Which measure would show genuine progress in your organisation?
Sources: https://www.axa.com/press/press-releases/axa-and-publicis-sapient-collaborate-to-deploy-global-ai-hub-at-scale
https://www.eiopa.europa.eu/publications/scaling-ai-finance-systemic-risks-resilience-and-european-sovereignty_en