Switzerland regulates a broad range of financial activities. As a basic principle, accepting and managing assets deposited by the public for commercial purposes requires a license issued by FINMA, and the acceptance of funds from the public other than in the context of a debenture issue or within certain narrowly defined exceptions set out in the Banking Ordinance is prohibited without the respective license. In particular, the following types of activities must be licensed by FINMA:

• Banking – This is defined as the acceptance of deposits from the public.
• Fintech license – This "banking license light" category is designed for innovative firms that intend to accept deposits from the public of up to CHF 100 million without conducting the traditional deposits and loans banking business.
• Securities dealing – Various types of trading require licenses (regulated in the FinIA).
• Portfolio management and the activities of trustees.
• Operation of stock exchanges and similar trading facilities, such as multilateral trading facilities (MTFs), organized trading facilities (OTFs) and distributed ledger technology (DLT) trading facilities – Some activities, such as the operation of OTFs, may only be conducted by banks, securities dealers or other financial market participants supervised by FINMA.
• Operation of financial market infrastructures: central counterparties (CCPs), central securities depositories (CSDs), trade repositories and payment systems – A payment system requires a license only if this is necessary to safeguard the proper functioning of the financial system or the protection of financial market participants. A bank is not required to obtain an additional license for the operation of payment systems.
• Establishing, managing, safekeeping and distributing collective investment schemes (CIS) – The mere distribution of CIS to opt-out professional investors requires the appointment of a Swiss representative and a Swiss paying agent.
• Offering and intermediating insurance – The licensing requirement applies both to direct insurance and reinsurance. Furthermore, with very few exceptions, insurance brokers are subject to registration with FINMA.
• Issuing mortgage bonds (Pfandbriefe) – Only two institutions are admitted as issuers of mortgage bonds in Switzerland.

Other financial dealing/intermediation, such as issuing means of payment (including payment tokens/cryptocurrencies), precious metal and commodity dealing, leasing or factoring, is subject only to anti-money-laundering supervision under the AML Act.

Registration with a designated registration body is required for customer advisors of financial service providers that are not subjected to prudential supervision in Switzerland, but no license is required. Furthermore, financial service providers are generally bound to join an Ombudsman, which is a conciliation board, if they provide financial services in Switzerland.

As in the European Economic Area (EEA), the offering and admission to trading of financial instruments is generally subject to the duty to publish a prospectus which must be pre-approved by the review bodies, and in certain cases a key investor document (KID).