Swiss company data README
The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Swiss company data listing page.
swissco
Swiss company data from the shell. Look a company up by UID, search 790,000 of them by name or by legal purpose, list gazette publications, browse public tenders, check a bank licence, or watch a list of companies for change.
All data comes from six open-data sources, none of which needs a credential: Zefix on LINDAS for the commercial register, the Amtsblattportal for the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, simap.ch for public procurement, FINMA for authorised banks and securities firms, GLEIF for the Legal Entity Identifier and group structure, and ARAMIS for federally funded research.
Built and maintained by Prospex, a Swiss B2B sales intelligence platform.
Install
Python 3.14 or newer.
Docker
The image runs as an unprivileged user and keeps its state — watch's seen-ids
and the cached FINMA files — in /home/swissco/.swissco. Mount a volume there
for anything that needs to remember what it saw last time:
Zefix credentials, which every command works without, are passed through as environment variables:
Commands
Every command takes --format table|json|csv, --limit and --quiet.
swissco lookup
Everything the register publishes about one company.
Accepts CHE-444.420.929, CHE444420929, or the UID buried in other text.
swissco search
Companies by legal name or by statutory purpose: how a company describes what it does, in its own words, in the register.
--canton takes a two-letter code, --legal-form an eCH-0097 code (0106 is an AG,
0107 a GmbH).
swissco publications
Commercial-register publications from the gazette, in a date range.
Without --type, only the list pages are read: one request per 2,000 publications.
With --type, each surviving publication's body is fetched and classified into the
eleven event types
shab-parser recognises, so narrow the range and the canton first.
Ranges past about ten days are split into windows automatically. The API rejects any request whose page offset reaches 10,000, and the gazette publishes around a thousand commercial-register entries a day.
swissco events
One company's registry history.
The gazette's list pages carry no UID, only a title, so this resolves the UID to a legal name, keeps the publications whose title looks like that name, then fetches those bodies and keeps the events whose own UID matches. The title match decides what is worth downloading; the body's UID decides what is reported. Fetched bodies are cached under the state directory, so an overlapping re-run costs nothing.
swissco watch
What changed since last time.
Each company is compared by fingerprint, a digest over its identity, address and
purpose fields. Exits 10 when something changed and 0 when nothing did, so cron
can branch on it:
A UID that has left the dataset is reported as no longer in the dataset, never as deleted. LINDAS carries only active entities, so a UID can leave the dataset after a re-registration, a correction, or a publication lag.
swissco tenders
Public procurement projects from simap, by canton and publication date.
--canton and --type are repeatable; --lang picks which language the title and
buyer are reported in. Paging is a cursor rather than an offset, so a wide range
costs pages instead of failing.
The date range filters each project's newest publication, not the award inside it. A project awarded in March whose newest publication is an August correction appears only in a range covering August.
swissco vendor
Whether a company is registered as a supplier on simap.
A UID is resolved to a legal name, searched for, and then confirmed against the
directory's own uidNo. The name finds the candidates; the UID decides between
them — the directory holds both an "Egli Gartenbau AG Sursee" and an "Egli
Gartenbau AG Uster".
There is no command for what a company has won. The supplier named on a simap award carries no UID, only free text typed by a procurement office. Matching those names would produce a plausible answer that is sometimes about a different company, so it is not offered.
swissco finma
FINMA's authorised banks and securities firms, joined to a UID.
Also swissco finma "Raiffeisen", --licence, --category, and --finma on
lookup. Both files are cached for a week under the state directory.
Banks and securities firms only: FINMA licenses insurers, portfolio managers and fund management companies on separate lists this does not read. A miss means "not on this list", never "unlicensed".
swissco lei
A company's Legal Entity Identifier, and the group it is consolidated into.
--children lists what this company consolidates instead of counting it, and
--lei on lookup folds the same fields into a company profile.
The parent is often foreign, and that is the reason to run this: a Swiss subsidiary's owner abroad has no commercial-register entry, so the register cannot answer the question at all.
GLEIF Level 2 records accounting consolidation: a parent is the entity that consolidates this one into its accounts, which it may do without owning all of it. About 28,000 Swiss entities hold an LEI against roughly 790,000 in the register, so a miss means "no LEI on file" and nothing more.
swissco research
Federally funded research projects from ARAMIS, the Confederation's register of research and innovation mandates. Innosuisse and SNSF money included.
A UID is confirmed against each project's own participant UID, so every row
reported is exact. Free text is searched as given and every hit comes back with
its participating organisations. --limit caps how many candidates are hydrated,
since the participant list costs one request per project, and --lang picks DE,
EN, FR or IT.
ARAMIS searches project titles, abstracts and the free-text contractor field, and indexes the structured participant list under none of them. A company named only as a structured partner cannot be found, which is where Innosuisse implementation partners usually sit, so an empty result means only that no project mentions this company by name. It is not evidence that the company has taken no federal research money.
swissco reads the organisation, the role, the UID and the place off a
participant. ARAMIS also publishes the researcher's name, e-mail address and
telephone numbers, and none of those has a field in the parser.
Output
--format is the only thing that changes the output. A command piped into jq and
the same command watched by a person produce identical bytes, so a script that works
in your terminal works in CI.
table and csv are rendered from the same rows that json serialises, so a column
cannot appear in one format and be missing from another. Progress notes go to stderr,
where --quiet silences them; errors go to stderr as a single JSON object.
Use it from a coding agent
This repository ships an Agent Skill. It
teaches Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and around twenty other agents how to drive
swissco: every command, and the traps that quietly produce a wrong answer.
The skill is the directory .agents/skills/swissco/, the cross-client location
every compliant agent scans, with .claude/skills/swissco symlinked to it so
Claude Code finds it in its own. tests/test_skill.py asserts the spec's rules
against it on every run, so the skill cannot drift out of the format without the
suite saying so.
It lands in the consuming project's own .agents/skills/swissco/, symlinked
into each agent's directory. Add -g to install it once for every project,
--all to accept the defaults without being asked. swissco still has to be on
the path or reachable through uvx.
The agent can then answer questions like "which companies in Zug mention blockchain in their purpose" or "has anything changed at CHE-105.943.826 since June" by running the right command itself.
Use it as an MCP server
The same six sources are available as an MCP server, from this repository.
Nine tools, one per command except watch.
Every tool returns rows, a count, and notes. The rows are the dicts
swissco --format json prints, so a field carries the same name in both
surfaces. The notes carry what each source covers, which is what turns an empty
result into an answer: FINMA's list omits insurers and portfolio managers, and
about 28,000 Swiss entities hold an LEI against roughly 790,000 in the
register.
It lives in mcp/, ships as the PyPI package
swissco-mcp and the npm package of
the same name, and is registered as ch.prospex/swissco. Full reference for
every tool, its arguments and its caveats:
swissco-mcp.readthedocs.io.
Access and terms
SHAB / Amtsblattportal. The REST API is the channel the operator offers for
machine access: freely accessible, no authentication for published data, no
documented rate limit, page size capped at 2,000. The website UI is disallowed by
robots.txt, which does not reach the API. The operator disclaims completeness, and
only the signed PDF is legally binding.
Zefix on LINDAS. Published on opendata.swiss, no credentials. Commercial-use terms have never been settled; the dataset page states what applies.
Zefix PublicREST. Requires credentials issued by zefix@bj.admin.ch. Every
command here works without them. Supplying them through --user/--password or
ZEFIX_USER/ZEFIX_PASSWORD adds capital, status, deletion date, former names and
corporate relations to lookup, and a name-prefix search to search.
simap. The read API answers unauthenticated. The site's robots.txt disallows
the single-page app's project-detail routes, which swissco refuses outright; it
says nothing about /api, where every request here goes.
FINMA. Two published files, downloaded as any browser would. FINMA republishes rather than versions them, so they are cached for a week and re-fetched after that.
GLEIF. The record API answers unauthenticated. GLEIF publishes the LEI data for anyone to use, and the terms of use state what applies.
ARAMIS. The public service answers unauthenticated and asks not to be
flooded, so swissco paces it and reads one project at a time. The 43 MB bulk
export sits on a host this client's allowlist omits, which is why no command can
pull it.
Being a good citizen
These are small public services run by federal offices. swissco sends one request
every 0.5 seconds at most — one a second for FINMA, which asks for more room — backs
off exponentially on failure, and identifies itself with a real User-Agent carrying
this repository's URL. --interval can raise those floors and cannot lower them.
Built on
| Package | Does |
|---|---|
zefix-parser | Zefix: LINDAS SPARQL, PublicREST, UID validation |
shab-parser | SHAB: discovery, fetch, parse, eleven-type event classification |
Both are MIT and maintained alongside this one. simap, FINMA, GLEIF and ARAMIS
ship no client, so swissco carries its own for those four.
Watching more than a list
swissco watch from cron is the free version of what Prospex
sells. Prospex watches the whole register continuously, joins it to hiring, funding,
tenders and web signals — including the award side of simap that this tool
deliberately leaves alone — and tells you which of those changes is worth a call. If a
cron job and a UID list cover it, this tool is all you need.
License
MIT