“Proxeus helps speeding up Swiss business incorporations”

It takes up to six weeks to incorporate a business in Switzerland. In May 2018, Proxeus and various partners showed that this time can be reduced to less than two hours by using the blockchain to coordinate processes more effectively (find more details in this article).

After the successful proof of concept, the project aims at registering up to 100 companies in 2019 while fine-tuning the process at the same time. We spoke to the lawyer Philippe Kaiser from Kaiser Odermatt & Partner who is involved into the project.

When did the project start and who initiated it?

The first meetings took place in June 2017. The project was initiated as part of a challenge by digitalswitzerland. The challenge was formulated by IBM, E&Y and Swisscom.

What project roles are there and which one do you have?

The project team consists of lawyers, notaries, banks, authorities (register of commerce), IT service providers and developers. I am participating as a lawyer and notary.

What are the problems with today’s process of registering a new company in the Swiss commercial register?

On the one hand, the process is paper-based: the main document is 30 pages long and every detail needs to be thoroughly verified. On the other hand, there are various parties involved what makes the information flow complex and slow. Today, it takes up to six weeks to get a new company registered.

Which part(s) of today’s process takes the most time?

The information gathering and the information exchange between the participants are very time consuming.

How is the Proxeus platform used to streamline the process?

The tool highly simplifies the processes for data entry, document creation and data exchange between all the parties that are involved.

How is it to work with the tool?

The Proxeus tool is very simple and intuitive to use. As there are no extensive programming skills necessary, it’s a great solution for not so tech-avid users as well.

What are the biggest time savings using Proxeus?

The relevant data only needs to be fed digitally into the tool once and is afterwards available for exchange among all the involved parties. That’s a huge advantage compared to today’s process.

Following the initial success, the test phase has been prolonged to register up to 100 companies with Proxeus in 2019 — where are you today regarding this goal?

We are currently at 20+ registrations so far this year. We say: Quality before quantity! After each new successful registration, the process is analyzed and improved before starting the next registration. Although the optimization of the process takes a lot of time, it’s more important to us than mere figures.

Do you see other processes that could be simplified by Proxeus?

Yes, we can certainly imagine many other use cases. In particular, the intuitive handling of the tool opens up many possibilities and easy access for users that aren’t IT experts.