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This guide contains public integration notes for Switzerland. Use it for identifier formats, search behavior, and country-specific caveats. The live source of truth for coverage, pricing, data sources, documents, legal forms, roles, and status values is the pricing page.

Switzerland coverage, pricing, and sources

Open the current catalog for supported datapoints, documents, sources, identifiers, and availability.
Country details below are preserved as integration notes. If a table or example conflicts with the live pricing page, use the pricing page as the source of truth and contact support.

Table of Contents

Data Sources

Switzerland uses two official federal-level sources. For a given entity, all company data comes from a single primary source (Zefix), with legal representative data extracted separately from SOGC publications.

All company types

  • Zefix (Zentraler Firmenindex): The Central Business Name Index, operated by the Federal Office of Justice (FOJ) since 2004. Zefix aggregates data from all 26 cantonal commercial registers into a single searchable index via a REST API. This is the primary source for all company data: legal name, status, legal form, registered address, share capital, activity description (purpose), and identifiers. Zefix data is sourced from the cantonal commercial registers, which are the authoritative registers of record.
  • SOGC/SHAB (Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce): The Schweizerisches Handelsamtsblatt / Feuille officielle suisse du commerce, published electronically since 2002 and managed by SECO. All commercial register mutations are published in the SOGC as structured text. Used for two purposes: (1) as the source for legal representative extraction via AI parsing of publication texts (Zefix does not provide structured legal representative data); (2) as the source for the Certificate of Incorporation document (the SOGC publication announcing the initial registration).

Cantonal Commercial Registers (for documents)

Switzerland has 26 cantonal commercial registers (Handelsregisterämter), each maintaining the register of companies domiciled in that canton. While Zefix serves as the central index for company data, the cantonal registers issue the Trade Register Extract documents. There are two technical implementations:
  • chregister.ch: A web application used by 22 cantons (AG, AI, AR, BE, BL, BS, GL, GR, JU, LU, NW, OW, SG, SH, SO, SZ, TG, TI, UR, VS, ZG, ZH). Trade register extract PDFs are retrieved automatically.
  • HRC Modern: An Angular application with a REST API used by 4 cantons (Fribourg, Geneva, Neuchatel, Vaud). Trade register extract PDFs are downloaded directly via HTTP.
The cantonal commercial registers are the authoritative source of record. Zefix aggregates their data into a searchable central index but does not itself issue official documents. Trade register extracts are issued by the relevant cantonal register.

Company Identifiers

Query Identifiers

UID Format Breakdown: CHE-408.600.128 = CHE (country prefix, always CHE for Switzerland) + 9 random non-descriptive digits. The UID (Unternehmens-Identifikationsnummer) is assigned by the Federal Statistical Office and is permanent.
UID Format for Profile vs SearchFor /v2/company company-data requests, only the UID format without separators is accepted: CHE408600128. For search, both CHE-408.600.128 (with separators) and CHE408600128 (without) are supported. The system automatically normalizes the format internally.

Identifiers in API Response

Once you retrieve company data, the identifiers object contains all available identifiers for that entity:

Search Capabilities

Search Performance: Use UID-based searches for best performance and exact matching. Name searches query the Zefix API and may return multiple results. UID searches are automatically normalized to the canonical dotted format (CHE-XXX.XXX.XXX) before querying Zefix.
Search uses live Zefix API lookups. Both identifier and name searches query the Zefix REST API in real-time. Name searches require a minimum of 3 characters and a maximum of 100 characters.

Quirks & Gotchas

Mappings

Company Status

Company status is determined deterministically from Zefix data. No AI inference is involved.
When a company has status CANCELLED and a deletionDate is present, the deletion date is used as the closureDate in the statusDetails response. The BEING_CANCELLED status corresponds to companies undergoing liquidation proceedings.
Switzerland uses the eCH-0097 data standard (Datenstandard Unternehmensidentifikation) for legal form classification. The system maps all 35 eCH-0097 codes deterministically to ISO 20275 (ELF) codes and standardized forms. No AI inference is involved for legal forms.
Multilingual legal form names: Swiss legal form names from Zefix come in the registration language of the company (German, French, Italian, or English). The legalForm.localName reflects this. The eCH-0097 code is used for deterministic mapping regardless of language.
The full eCH-0097 specification is available at eCH. ISO 20275 ELF codes are maintained by GLEIF. All 35 Swiss legal form codes are deterministically mapped, so no AI enrichment is needed for legal forms.
Legal representatives are extracted from the official cantonal trade register extract (Handelsregisterauszug / extrait du registre du commerce). Zefix publishes no structured officer roster, so the extract’s own person table — which states each person’s role and signing authority — is fetched and parsed by AI. It may be in German, French, Italian or English depending on the canton. legalRepresentatives contains only people the register grants signing authority, so every entry carries a non-null representationMode. Board members the register lists without signing authority, and the statutory auditor, are returned under otherKeyPersons instead — see Listing the full board. If a cantonal portal is temporarily unavailable, the answer falls back to AI parsing of SOGC publications (Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce), which is less complete.
Signature types documented in SOGC publications:
  • mit Einzelzeichnung / avec signature individuelle / con firma individuale = individual signature rights
  • mit Kollektivzeichnung zu zweien / avec signature collective a deux / con firma collettiva a due = joint signature rights (two jointly)
Whether a person is a legal representative or an other key person is decided by the extract’s own “Signing authority” column, not by their job title: anyone the register grants signing authority is a legal representative; anyone it lists without is an other key person. A “Mitglied des Verwaltungsrates” (Board Member) is therefore a legal representative when they can sign and an other key person when the extract says “without signing authority” — in both cases they carry corporateBody: "board". Both individuals and corporate entities can hold roles.

Representation Mode

Legal representatives extracted from SOGC publications include a representationMode field indicating signing authority:
  • { mode: "sole" }: Can sign alone (“mit Einzelzeichnung” / “avec signature individuelle” / “con firma individuale”)
  • { mode: "joint", minimumSignatories: 2 }: Must sign jointly with one other (“mit Kollektivzeichnung zu zweien” / “avec signature collective à deux” / “con firma collettiva a due”)
  • { mode: "joint", minimumSignatories: N }: Must sign jointly with a specified number of others
  • null: only possible on the SOGC fallback path; on the cantonal-extract path a person with no signing authority is returned under otherKeyPersons instead
The field is extracted from the extract’s “Signing authority” / “Zeichnungsart” / “Signature mode” column.

Other Key Persons

People the cantonal extract lists without signing authority. They cannot bind the company, which is why they are not returned as legal representatives. Requires the cantonal extract. For a company Zefix publishes no cantonal extract link for, this datapoint returns a no_document_available error rather than an empty list, and is not billed.

Listing the full board

Because the split is by signing authority, a company’s board of directors can span both arrays. Every person carries a corporateBody field naming the body they sit on (board, supervisoryBoard, management, audit; absent for an authorized signatory, who holds a power of attorney rather than a seat). Filter across both arrays:
Switzerland has no separate supervisory organ: the Verwaltungsrat is the board of directors, so supervisoryBoard is never returned for a Swiss company.

Shareholders

Shareholder data is not currently available for Swiss companies. The Swiss commercial register (Zefix) and SOGC publications do not provide structured shareholder or ownership data in a programmatically accessible format.

Activity Code Mapping

Switzerland does not use a national activity code classification in the Zefix registry. Activity codes are AI-inferred from the company’s purpose (Zweck / But / Scopo) field, which is a free-text description of the company’s business activities.
Both NACE and ISIC codes are always AI-inferred for Swiss companies because the Zefix registry provides only a free-text activity description, not structured activity codes. The isAIInferred flag is always true for Swiss activity codes. The single code inferred from the purpose text is also flagged with isMainActivity: true. Since that code is AI-inferred, it is distinguishable from a main activity a register would declare itself; an absent flag means the source did not designate one.

Data Availability

Data Availability Matrix

Legend: ✅ Available | ❌ Not Available | ⚠️ Conditionally Available | Async = Asynchronous processing

Documents by Company Type

Canton-specific document retrieval: Trade register extracts are fetched from the relevant canton’s register. 22 cantons use the chregister.ch platform (~10s delivery), while 4 cantons (FR, GE, NE, VD) use the HRC Modern platform (~1s delivery). The system automatically routes to the correct platform based on the company’s cantonal registration.

Example API Responses

All examples use placeholder data. Query: POST /v2/company with { "id": "<id>", "countryCode": "CH", "dataPoints": ["company", "legalRepresentatives"] }
Note: Closed companies have active: false with a closureDate when available. Legal representatives may not be available for dissolved companies as SOGC publications for deleted entities may be limited.
Note: Sole proprietorships (Einzelunternehmen / Entreprise individuelle / Ditta individuale) use the owner’s name as the legalName. Legal representatives are not typically present.
Documents are returned when "dataPoints": ["availableDocuments"] is requested.

Data Source Priority & Routing

For a given entity, all company profile data comes from Zefix. There is no multi-source priority chain or fallback logic. Legal representatives come separately from SOGC publications via AI parsing.
Source Routing:
  1. Company data (name, status, legal form, address, capital, purpose, identifiers): Zefix API (live query via REST API)
  2. Legal representatives: SOGC publications (AI-parsed from combined SOGC text messages available via Zefix)
  3. Activity codes: AI-inferred from the free-text purpose field
  4. Legal form standardization: Deterministic eCH-0097 to ISO 20275 mapping (AI only used as fallback if eCH-0097 code is not in the mapping table)
  5. Status enrichment: AI-enriched for detailed status information

Attribute-Level Source Mapping