Compliance
Compliance (regulatory compliance) means conforming to comply with relevant laws and regulations. Together with KYC Spider in Zug Eurospider has in-depth compliance know-how.
White and black lists, also called positive and negative lists, are used for binary categorizations. Examples are spam filters against unwanted e-mails, but also proscription lists in the Roman Empire with the names of unpopular political opponents to be murdered. More recent are the lists published by the American President George Bush after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. White and black lists can be combined in different ways: All positives but without negatives and all negatives but without the positives. In compliance, whitelisting is often used when periodically checking a customer base.
On December 13, 2019, an interdepartmental work group presented its report Challenges of Artificial Intelligence commissioned by the Federal Council. Section 1.6.16 addresses the use of artificial-intelligence in the judicial system. The matter of compliance is also relevant here. The European Ethical Charter on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Judicial Systems and their environment distinguishes between four types of use: “uses to be encouraged”, “possible uses, requiring considerable methodological precautions”, “uses to be considered following additional scientific studies”, and “uses to be considered with the most extreme reservations”. What does this mean specifically in terms of compliance?
Assistance systems exist in a variety of forms. The simplest passive systems are limited to recommendations and warnings, which people can either heed or ignore. Digital assistants that carry out conversations are more complex. The easiest ones to develop are digital assistants that control the conversation – yet these assistants are anything but trivial. The assistant asks questions and the person answers them. This makes it possible to formulate questions that based on previous answers. More sophisticated assistants bring users out of an “anomalous state of knowledge” (ASK).
Chains of trust play an important role in digital processes. Just like in everyday life, the question is: who trusts whom, and why? The relationship isn’t necessarily symmetrical: party A may trust party B, but B doesn’t necessarily trust A. However, the relationship usually is transitive: if party A trusts party B and party B trusts party C, then A can also trust C. These chains of trust also play an important role in the digital world
Automatically created documents play an important role in digitalized compliance processes. Publications are also created algorithmically outside of compliance processes. A well-known example is MIT’s fake papers, which were submitted to academic journals and, surprisingly, accepted [1]. On October 8, 2019, an employee of the Springer publishing house presented the first chemistry book written by a computer at a conference in Osnabrück. The book is not fake – it is intended as a serious publication. It cost EUR 100.99 on Amazon on the day of the conference, but can be downloaded free of charge as a PDF from the Springer website. One of the attendees did exactly that and checked whether the newly appointed Nobel Prize winners in chemistry appear in the Springer book.
Data Protection Act
The Swiss Data Protection Act underwent a complete revision in 2020, and its new version took effect on September 1, 2023, along with the new Data Protection Ordinance (DPO). The revision itself is complete, but its practical application continues to evolve. The topic of AI is particularly relevant: On May 8, 2025, the FDPIC confirmed that the DPA is technology-neutral and applies directly to all AI applications. In practice, this means, among other things, that users must know whether they are interacting with AI (transparency requirement, Art. 19), and that a data protection impact assessment is mandatory in cases of high risk—such as profiling or facial recognition (Art. 22). The Federal Office of Justice (FOJ) is drafting a consultation document on AI regulation to be completed by the end of 2026. With this, Switzerland will implement the Council of Europe's AI Convention.
