LATEST AND RELEVANTE
NEWS TO COMPLIANCE

An overview of last year's MLA rulings by the Federal Supreme Court

Last year (2024), the Federal Supreme Court handed down a total of thirteen rulings in the area of money laundering and financial offenses. Four of these rulings are particularly noteworthy as they concern the duty of care of financial intermediaries.

A first ruling (6B_271/2022) showed that banks bear joint responsibility with regard to due diligence obligations when verifying the identity and origin of client funds. In another case (7B_685/2023), it is emphasized that without a necessary FINMA license, a violation of the AMLA can be established, as registration and licensing regulations are violated. Another important ruling (2C_1010/2022) confirms that banks are entitled to identify beneficial owners and pass on their information within the scope of international administrative assistance. The importance of due diligence for financial intermediaries and the connection to fraud scandals is also emphasized once again in a further ruling (7B_982/2023). Ultimately, it was decided that a notice of seizure does not constitute a basis for assuming a risk of money laundering.

Vector-based indexing of Federal Supreme Court judgments - On November 13, 2024

Thomas Murphy reported at the DA-3 workshop on the retrieval effectiveness of LLM-based search methods to find relevant judgments of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court. To determine the search quality, whether relevant judgments are effectively found or not, a test collection is essential. Thomas uses a test collection from Eurospider with 123 test queries for which the relevant judgments are known. He compared the retrieval effectiveness of different search methods based on their yield and precision. After numerous experiments, an improvement was achieved on the test collection with a combination of LLM-based vector retrieval and text retrieval optimized for legal information.

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