2025 brought a mixture of the familiar and the surprisingly new. While the tech world succumbed to “AI fever” – the finance word of the year – the Swiss financial centre’s attention focused on the many proposals on banking stability and the SNB’s return to zero interest rates. In his end-of-year interview, Martin Hess, Chief Economist at the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA), offers his views on the current environment, and outlines the importance of a global financial actor, the progress made on deposit tokens, and why every new regulation must pass a competitiveness test.