Where Swiss Company Data Actually Lives
Finding a Swiss company in a register is easy. Working out whether it is hiring, expanding, changing directors or preparing a new offer takes several sources. This guide explains what the most useful Swiss sources can tell a sales team and how current their records are. The guide also maps the coverage of each source.
| Sales question | Primary source |
|---|---|
| Confirm a legal entity | Zefix |
| Investigate a register change | SHAB |
| See hiring demand | Job boards, LinkedIn |
| Watch product positioning | Company websites |
| Find a trademark filing | Swissreg |
| Size a territory | BFS |
Official company records: Zefix, SHAB and cantonal registers
Zefix (Central Business Name Index)
Use Zefix to confirm a company's legal identity and follow the link to its cantonal register entry. A search returns the legal name, legal form, UID, registered office and entry date. Operating metrics such as revenue and headcount require another source.
SHAB (Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce)
SHAB publishes the legal notices behind every Zefix change. When a company incorporates, changes its board, increases its share capital, or enters liquidation, the notice goes into SHAB. Bankruptcy proceedings and calls to creditors are published here too, as are debt enforcement summons.
SHAB is useful when you know which accounts and events to watch. A capital increase may justify checking for financing news, while a new board member may be relevant to an account with an active deal. A change to the purpose clause may warrant checking the company's own announcement. Liquidation and bankruptcy notices are reasons to review the account before the next outreach.
Checked on 16 September 2026: SHAB supports email subscriptions to saved searches through a user profile. The selected search period controls the delivery interval. See the official instructions and our company monitoring setup guide. Broad prospecting still requires filtering legal text across languages.
Cantonal commercial registers
Zefix links to the relevant cantonal entry. Use that entry when you need the complete register record or historical mutations. Search options and downloadable documents vary by canton. Start with the UID for the initial match.
| Source | What it covers | Update speed | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zefix | Name, legal form, UID, registered office | ~1 business day | Free |
| SHAB | Legal mutations, capital changes, liquidations, bankruptcies | Same day as publication | Free |
| Cantonal registers | Full entry, signatories, articles of association | Varies by canton | Free search, extracts CHF 10–40 |
Job boards as a leading indicator
A company that posts five engineering roles in Zurich this month is telling you what it is currently building and how big the team around it is meant to get. It describes the company's planned shape. Budget availability for your offer requires separate evidence. Look at the function, location, seniority and posting date, and check whether several roles form a cluster.
jobs.ch is the dominant Swiss job board. Jobscout24 covers a similar market. Both support company and location searches, with filters by function. Neither offers an API for systematic monitoring. LinkedIn job postings cover roles advertised on company pages, including senior and international roles. They also cover tech positions.
Recent job postings can show where a team is adding capacity, but the signal decays quickly. Use the original posting date and look for a cluster of recent roles. A single long-running vacancy is weak evidence of growth. The right monitoring frequency depends on your sales cycle and account volume.
Company websites and press
Website changes
A company's website shows how it currently presents itself. A new product page or a rewritten "About us" section is public and authoritative. So is a press release about an office expansion.
Monitoring at scale requires choosing pages and taking regular snapshots. It also needs rules that ignore routine changes such as cookie text or copyright dates. For a small account list, watching a few high-value pages may be enough.
Startup and tech press
Startupticker.ch covers Swiss startup funding rounds and product launches. It also reports on awards. If your target market includes growth-stage companies, use it to follow disclosed events in the Swiss startup market.
General Swiss business press (Handelszeitung, Bilanz, PME Magazine) covers larger companies and M&A activity. Trade publications cover verticals. Much of this valuable content sits behind paywalls. Its article format also requires manual processing.
Trademark and IP registers
A trademark application can reveal a name or product category before it appears on the company's website. Search Swissreg by applicant, then check the filing status and owner. Review the Nice classes before drawing a conclusion. The application may relate to a future launch or an existing brand. Defensive registrations also appear in the register.
New filings are published weekly. Each record gives the Nice classification, which tells you the product category, and the filing date. The applicant's address is included too.
Trademark filings are most relevant to teams selling to brand and product functions. Legal functions are another relevant audience. A fresh filing gives context for outreach. Verify any product launch separately.
LinkedIn and social signals
LinkedIn is useful for changes involving people, such as a new decision-maker or a promotion. It can also show a team hiring several similar roles. Company pages can add context, but employee counts and self-reported profile data should be treated as estimates.
The practical constraint is that LinkedIn restricts API access to approved partners. Sales Navigator offers alerts and filters at a per-seat monthly cost. Register mutations and financial filings require other sources, as do website changes.
LinkedIn is strongest for people signals such as arrivals and departures. Promotions appear there too. Use other sources for company-level signals such as funding and expansion. Product news also requires separate coverage.
Federal Statistical Office (BFS)
The BFS publishes the Business and Enterprise Register (BUR), along with NOGA industry classifications, employment statistics by sector and canton, and business demography data on company formations and closures, including survival rates.
Use these datasets for market-level questions. BFS data helps with market sizing and territory planning by sector and canton. It also supports analysis by company cohort. Account-level prospecting needs another source. Publication schedules differ by dataset, so check the reference period before comparing a BFS series with a current company event.
| Source | Current company record | Named officers | Capital events | Job postings | Trademark filings | Typical delay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zefix | ● | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | one business day |
| SHAB | ○ | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | same day |
| Cantonal registers | ● | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | same day, one canton at a time |
| Moneyhouse | ● | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | register same, accounts months |
| Job boards | ○ | ○ | ○ | ● | ○ | hours |
| Swissreg | ○ | ○ | ○ | ○ | ● | days after filing |
Commercial databases: Moneyhouse and its peers
Commercial databases repackage official records into a faster search and monitoring workflow. Depending on the provider and subscription, that can include management links, credit information, company monitoring and international relationships.
Moneyhouse is the most widely used in Switzerland. The free tier shows basic register data. As checked on 16 September 2026, free registration includes two company or person follows with email notifications. Paid tiers expand monitoring and data access. Dun & Bradstreet and Crif serve similar roles with different coverage and pricing.
Coverage varies by field and company. Before buying, test the database against a sample of your target accounts. Check whether the records you need are present, current, exportable and licensed for your intended use.
What a paid data tool saves
Most sources in this guide are free to search. A paid tool earns its price when it reduces work that your team would otherwise perform repeatedly: matching the same company across sources, detecting meaningful changes, removing routine noise and sending the result to the right owner.
Monitoring 500 named accounts is an operations problem. The team has to define which changes matter, match records to the right company, remove duplicate or routine updates, and give each useful item to an account owner. The sources are accessible. Maintaining that workflow is where the cost accumulates.
A capital change becomes useful only after someone links the SHAB notice to the right account and reads the filing. They must then decide whether it changes the outreach. Delay at any of those steps can make the event old news.
Test a tool on a representative account list before committing. Measure match quality, source coverage, delay and the effort still required to verify each item. Also check export rights and integration limits for the way your team plans to use the data.
How Prospex ties these sources together
Prospex monitors the sources described above and matches changes to Swiss company profiles. It filters them against your ideal customer profile. Each item gives the account owner source context to verify the change and decide whether it warrants outreach.
A register change can appear alongside recent hiring or website activity from the same company, so you can assess the account in one place.
Create a free account to see recent signals for companies in your market.