Swiss company data: how ProxDeal creates transparency

Switzerland is one of the most attractive business locations in the world: stable companies, a high concentration of capital and a diversified range of industries, from pharmaceuticals and mechanical engineering to financial services. For M&A advisors, investors and corporates, Switzerland ought to be a paradise.

In practice, it is the opposite: a data blind spot.

If you have ever tried to analyse the Swiss market systematically – not looking up individual companies, but building a complete picture of an industry – you will know the frustration. The information exists somewhere. But pulling it together takes days, sometimes weeks. And at the end, one question remains: have I really found all the relevant companies?

This article explains why that is and what ProxDeal has done about it.

Why Switzerland is so difficult for data analysis

Switzerland has no central commercial register (Handelsregister) in the strict sense. What it has instead is a federal patchwork: each of the 26 cantons keeps its own register, the federal government operates a central index called ZEFIX, and the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce (SHAB) documents every change. Three systems, three logics, three languages.

ZEFIX: good for individual look-ups, not for analysis

The Central Business Name Index lists around 730,000 active companies. If you know the name of a specific company, you will quickly find its basic data here. But ZEFIX offers no depth. Who sits on the board of directors, what the ownership structure looks like, whether the company has recently carried out a capital increase – all of that sits one level deeper, in the cantonal registers.

And this is exactly where it gets tedious.

26 cantons, 26 different worlds

Each canton structures its data differently. Zurich looks different from Geneva, Ticino publishes in Italian and the cantons of western Switzerland in French. There is no uniform format and no central export function. If you wanted to screen an industry across the whole of Switzerland, you would in theory have to search 26 different systems – and merge the results by hand.

In practice, nobody does that. Instead, most people limit themselves to the large cantons (Zurich, Bern, perhaps Geneva and Basel as well) and hope they are not missing anything relevant. That is understandable – but it also means that attractive targets based in Zug, Schwyz, Thurgau or another smaller canton are regularly overlooked.

SHAB: every change, but not the big picture

The Official Gazette of Commerce records every development: new incorporations, management changes, bankruptcies, changes of address. As an early-warning system it is valuable – but it is a chronological news feed, not a searchable database. If you want to know which medical technology companies currently exist in Switzerland, you will not find the answer in the SHAB.

What this means for day-to-day work

This structure has consequences for several professional groups:

M&A advisors building a longlist for a Swiss mandate often spend days on manual research – and still cannot be sure that the list is complete. Particularly in niche industries, where relevant companies are spread across the whole of Switzerland, the risk of overlooking candidates is high.

Private equity investors and debt funds that want to screen the Swiss market systematically for targets run into the same hurdle. Ownership structures and management changes – both important signals for investment decisions – are public, but cannot be retrieved from a central source.

Corporate development teams looking to identify competitors or potential acquisition targets in Switzerland often work with incomplete data or with expensive but superficial company databases that have significant gaps in their Swiss coverage.

The common problem: the information exists and it is public – but the effort required to gather it and keep it up to date is more than individual teams can manage.

How ProxDeal has opened up the Swiss market

ProxDeal has fundamentally solved this problem – not through manual research, but by building its own data infrastructure for Switzerland.

Every registered company, without exception

ProxDeal covers all of the roughly 730,000 companies entered in the Swiss commercial register. Not a selection, not a sample of the largest cantons, but every single legal entity – from an AG in Zurich to a GmbH in Appenzell Innerrhoden.

For you as a user, this means that if a company is entered in the Swiss commercial register, it is in ProxDeal. You no longer have to worry about having missed something in a screening.

Depth, not just basic data

While ZEFIX essentially provides the company name, legal form and registered office, ProxDeal goes much further: board members, management, authorised signatories, corporate purpose, capital structure and the complete register history. This is complemented by additional contextual information such as website content and industry classifications.

This turns a dry register entry into a usable company profile – one you can work with directly, without having to consult three other sources.

All languages, one search

Data from French- and Italian-speaking cantons is normalised automatically. A single search returns results from across Switzerland, regardless of the language in which a canton keeps its data. What sounds obvious is anything but: if you work without this normalisation, you will systematically overlook French-speaking Switzerland (Romandie) and Ticino.

Data points updated daily

Every day, ProxDeal analyses the official SHAB publications and automatically integrates all changes into the existing profiles:

New registrations appear as new records – relevant for anyone who wants to keep track of newly founded companies in specific industries.

Amendments to register entries flow directly into the existing profiles: changes in management or on the board of directors, capital increases, relocations of the registered office. A board change made yesterday will be reflected in the profile by tomorrow.

Bankruptcies and deregistrations are removed from the active dataset. It sounds trivial, but it matters in practice: nobody wants to write to companies that no longer exist.

What this changes in practice

For building longlists: A ProxDeal screening of the whole of Switzerland replaces manual research across 26 cantonal registers. The result is not only faster but demonstrably more complete – because it guarantees that no canton is left out.

For target screening and deal sourcing: Changes in ownership and management can be used as signals to identify the right moment for outreach. ProxDeal makes this information systematically accessible instead of letting it get lost in the daily SHAB publications.

For market and industry analysis: If you want to understand the Swiss market in a particular niche – number of companies, regional distribution, breakdown by size, management demographics – you now have, for the first time, a reliable data foundation instead of an estimate based on the three largest cantons.

Conclusion

For a long time, Switzerland was a blank spot on the data map – not because the information did not exist, but because 26 cantons, three languages and a lack of standardisation made it practically impossible to use systematically.

ProxDeal has closed this gap: complete coverage of all Swiss companies, data updated daily and genuine depth beyond the basics. If you have so far left Switzerland out of your DACH screening because the data quality was not good enough, that argument no longer holds.

Explore Swiss company data in ProxDeal now →

Frequently asked questions