Redundancy is not the number of institutions. It is the number of genuinely independent ways the system can carry risk.
We understand this intuitively in technology.
Critical systems are distributed across independent nodes, with redundancy and alternative routes. You design out single points of failure.
Financial markets can be thought about in much the same way.
A resilient capital market combines banks, private credit, insurers, pension funds, family offices, equity investors, market makers and secondary buyers with genuinely different risk appetites and underwriting capabilities.
If one channel cannot carry a risk, another may, at another price and through another structure.
That is not simply more capital.
It is more ways of carrying risk.
And there is an important distinction: more institutions do not automatically create more redundancy.
If different actors operate with increasingly similar collateral logic, eligibility criteria and investment constraints, the system may have many nodes but relatively few independent load paths.
Common regulatory frameworks can reinforce this convergence: when different institutions are required to evaluate and capitalise risks through increasingly standardised rulebooks, exposures can become economically attractive, or unattractive, to many of them at the same time.
Regulation may strengthen each node individually while unintentionally reducing the diversity of risk appetite across the system.
Switzerland offers an interesting case.
A December 2025 SECO Economic Cooperation and Development study, conducted by BAK Economics AG, identified specific gaps after the disappearance of Credit Suisse in substantial corporate lending, syndicated financing and complex financing.
Aggregate lending recovered. The ability to lead complex risk did not necessarily follow.
That distinction is important.
Volume tells us how much financing the system provides.
Depth tells us how many different risks it can understand, price, structure and carry.
This suggests a broader opportunity:
What if we thought about financial resilience not only as the strength of individual institutions, but also as the heterogeneity of the system connecting them?
That would mean encouraging complementary forms of risk-bearing rather than simply adding more providers of the same capital.
Strong banks. Specialist credit. Long-duration institutional capital. Entrepreneurial private capital. Deep equity markets. Secondary liquidity. Different underwriting models connecting them.
The objective is not weaker standards or more risk.
It is better distribution of risk across actors genuinely equipped to carry different parts of it.
Strong nodes. Distributed loads. Independent routes.
Switzerland already has extraordinary capital and financial infrastructure.
The opportunity is to make the architecture connecting them deeper, more heterogeneous and more resilient.