Switzerland’s Financial Watchdog Approves ECUREX

According to a press release from the startup, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), Switzerland’s financial watchdog, has decided that  the exchange is compliant with the Swiss Bank Secrecy Act, after 16 months of investigations.

ECUREX has been keeping a low profile since its founding in 2014. The digital currency exchange operates a cryptocurrency trading platform, and is currently invite only. The exchange will soon add fiat pairs to the platform, allowing traders to exchange Swiss francs and American dollars for a range of digital currencies.

Paolo Tasca, ECUREX CEO and co-founder, recently gave a presentation about Bitcoin’s market and technology trends, at an event created by Startup Europe which is part of the European Commission backed Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) initiative. Much of the presentation contained material from a yet to be released Digital Currencies Market Report by ECUREX.

Switzerland and Bitcoin

According to Tasca, “We think a stable regulatory environment is not only beneficial for us in the long-term, but also for our customers.”

“[Switzerland] has the most challenging regulatory environment for such a business and we are thrilled to be the first with a business model that allows us to operate here.”
— – Paolo Tasca, ECUREX CEO and Co-Founder

Unlike most European countries, Bitcoin and other digital currencies are treated as a foreign currency in Switzerland, not an asset like gold, or an item used for barter. This means that from the get go digital currency startups in the country have been regulated the same way large financial institutions have been.

FINMA made this clear in early 2014, when they publically stated that Bitcoin brokerages need to comply with Anti-Money-Laundering regulations, adding that digital currencies “did not fall into a legal vacuum.” Earlier this month the regulatory watchdog released a report, in German, stating that digital currencies present an “increased risk to money laundering.”

For other digital currency companies the country has offered protections in terms of financial privacy and freedom, which other jurisdictions lack. Universal Bitcoin service provider, Xapo, moved the company’s headquarters to the country earlier this month for those very reasons. The move follows months after Xapo brought their cold storage bitcoin vaults to the country, last year. Like ECUREX, Xapo’s CEO and co-founder, Wences Casares, also cited the country’s stable political environment as reasons for operating a digital currency business there.