PwC

PwC Switzerland carries out crypto audits of foundations, banks, custodians and exchanges, and it issues audit reports on stable tokens, asset tokens and other security tokens for investors and shareholders. For this work the firm uses a control-based crypto audit approach and the Halo crypto solution, a tool in its Halo suite of audit software. Halo independently checks that an entity has access to a given blockchain address, while the private keys stay under the control of the client, and it summarizes the transactions and balances recorded on that address.

Halo supports financial audits and control reports under the ISAE and SOC standards for entities that hold or trade crypto assets. Bastian Stolzenberg leads blockchain audit at PwC Switzerland as a partner of the firm. PwC also joined the cybersecurity working group of the Crypto Valley Association and helped write its guidelines on trusted key ceremonies, in which a custodian creates the private keys for the assets it holds in crypto custody.

PwC Switzerland combines its crypto services from advisory, assurance, tax and legal in one offering for the crypto sector. The advisory teams have helped clients become virtual asset service providers or custodians, tokenize assets and build platforms for minting NFTs. Its clients include traditional financial institutions as well as new market entrants and fintechs, and the firm works with exchanges, custodians and token issuers in Crypto Valley.

Patrick Akiki is the Financial Services Market Leader of PwC Switzerland, and Dario Orteca leads its Digital Asset Center of Excellence. The legal team for banks, securities firms and fintechs handles license applications, AML and KYC questions, outsourcing and cross-border business. That legal advice extends beyond Switzerland to the Principality of Liechtenstein and to the European Union.

In June 2026, PwC Switzerland published a study on tokenized funds and how they change fund distribution, subscriptions, redemptions and income payments. The study on fund operations and infrastructure counts more than USD 30 billion in tokenized assets, up from USD 5.7 billion in early 2025. Tokenized money market funds that hold US Treasury debt make up almost USD 15 billion of that total, or 47 percent.

Under Swiss law, fund units can be tokenized directly on a blockchain under the Collective Investment Schemes Act, without a new product class or a special structure. The study names DLT registers, investor disclosures on technology and cyber risks, AML and KYC whitelisting on the blockchain and the FINMA standards on outsourcing and IT governance as the main regulatory topics. In the Asset and Wealth Management Survey 2025 of PwC, 38 percent of asset managers saw tokenization as a major driver of revenue growth by 2030.

For its Blockchain Pulse Survey 2026, published on 28 September 2026, PwC Switzerland asked 25 Swiss retail banks, private banks, global banks and infrastructure providers about their blockchain business. Of these institutions, 68 percent had launched crypto offerings, and 64 percent each offered crypto custody and crypto trading. Only 12 percent offered tokenized assets, while another 24 percent had such offerings planned.

In the survey, 64 percent of the institutions saw high long-term potential for blockchain, while only 20 percent expected high potential within the next two years. The main barriers were a lack of strategic priority at 63 percent, low client interest at 58 percent and compliance or regulatory requirements at 46 percent.

The AI Center of Excellence of PwC Switzerland brings together 16 experts from different fields under its leader Sebastian Ahrens. Christian Westermann is the partner and AI leader of the Swiss firm. Inside PwC, the agent OS platform connects more than 250 AI agents to workflows in tax, assurance and advisory, and PwC says it speeds up the deployment of agents by up to ten times. For clients, PwC Switzerland builds AI agents such as Talk to Your Data, which explains changes in finance KPIs in natural language.

In March 2026, PwC and Microsoft published a playbook on agentic AI in financial services, co-written by Prafull Sharma of PwC Switzerland. In banking, the playbook sees the first gains in financial crime, regulatory compliance, customer engagement and lending. As its own first client, PwC rolled out Microsoft Copilot to more than 230,000 users in over 100 countries.

PwC stands for PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm created in 1998 by the worldwide merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand. In Switzerland, the roots of the firm go back to the Schweizerische Revisionsgesellschaft, founded in 1912, which merged with Price Waterhouse in 1990. The Schweizerische Treuhandgesellschaft, founded in 1906, merged with Coopers & Lybrand in Switzerland in 1991.

In the Blockchain Pulse Survey 2026 of PwC Switzerland, 80 percent of the institutions named stablecoins and central bank digital currencies as a main market trend for the next three to five years. Stablecoin and settlement services were still at an early stage, with 20 percent of the institutions offering them and another 20 percent planning them.

PwC Switzerland compared FINMA Guidance 08/2024, which the Swiss supervisor published on 18 December 2024, with the EU AI Act. The FINMA guidance sets principles for the governance and risk management of AI at banks, fund managers and insurers, while the EU AI Act is a detailed, risk-based law for all sectors. The EU AI Act also applies to providers and users outside the EU when an AI system is placed on the EU market or its use affects people in the EU.

PwC and the Alternative Investment Management Association publish an annual report on hedge funds and digital assets. In the sixth edition from October 2024, 47 percent of the traditional hedge funds surveyed had exposure to digital assets, up from 29 percent in 2023. A third of the hedge funds were committed to or exploring tokenization, and 43 percent of traditional hedge funds saw more interest from institutional clients.

The Zurich office of PwC Switzerland is located at Birchstrasse 160 in the postal district 8050 Zurich. PwC Switzerland has further offices in Aarau, Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano, Lucerne, Neuchâtel, St. Gallen, Winterthur and Zug, and one office in Liechtenstein.