On a Friday morning in Bern, Switzerland, a delegation of campaigners from Minneapolis stood before the shareholders’ meeting of the Swiss National Bank and made an argument that would have seemed surreal even five years ago: that a central bank, one of the most technically focused and politically restrained financial institutions in the world, should sell a specific publicly traded equity position because of what the company behind it does for a living.
The company is Palantir Technologies. The stake is $1.1 billion — specifically, 6.24 million shares held as part of the SNB’s 725 billion Swiss franc ($922 billion) foreign currency reserves portfolio as of the end of 2025. The ethical concern driving the campaign is Palantir’s work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for which the data analytics company won a contract to develop surveillance systems. That contract has drawn intensifying criticism since two US citizens were fatally shot in separate incidents involving immigration officials in Minneapolis in January 2026. The Minneapolis city council formally requested that the SNB sever ties with Palantir. Its delegation flew to Bern to deliver that request in person.
SNB Chairman Martin Schlegel’s response was measured, principled — and firm. He declined to comment on individual stocks. He explained the architecture of the SNB’s equity portfolio. He restated the bank’s exclusion criteria. And he held the line.
What the SNB Actually Is and Why Its Portfolio Works This Way
To evaluate the arguments made on both sides, it helps to understand a structural reality about the Swiss National Bank that is not widely appreciated outside the world of central banking: the SNB is not an investment fund. It is a central bank that has accumulated an enormous investment portfolio as an unintended consequence of its primary mandate.
Switzerland’s perpetual status as a safe-haven destination for global capital means the Swiss franc has been subject to persistent upward pressure for decades. When global uncertainty rises — financial crises, pandemics, geopolitical conflicts like the current Iran war — investors flee to Swiss francs, driving up the currency’s value. A strong franc is bad for Switzerland’s export-oriented economy, which depends on competitive pricing for its precision engineering, pharmaceutical, and financial services exports. To counter this appreciation pressure, the SNB buys foreign currencies — primarily euros and US dollars — and in doing so accumulates enormous reserves.
Those reserves need to be invested. Holding $922 billion in cash earns nothing and carries its own risks. The SNB therefore invests a substantial portion of its reserves in foreign equities — approximately 20% of its portfolio — following a market-neutral approach that weights holdings by market capitalisation. It buys broad slices of the global equity market rather than making individual stock picks. This is not a portfolio managed for financial return in the conventional sense. It is a byproduct of monetary policy intervention, managed to preserve value and maintain liquidity.
This is precisely the framework that Chairman Schlegel invoked on Friday. “We weight companies according to their market weight or market capitalization, in order to cover the market as broadly as possible and also to diversify risks,” he said. The SNB’s Palantir holding is not the result of an analyst deciding Palantir is an attractive investment. It is the result of Palantir’s market capitalisation making it a sufficiently significant constituent of the global equity indices that the SNB tracks. If Palantir’s weighting in the index changes, the SNB’s holding changes proportionally.
The Case the Minneapolis Campaigners Made
The delegation’s argument was specific and grounded in the SNB’s own published investment guidelines rather than in a general ethical appeal. The SNB explicitly states that it does not invest in companies that grossly violate commonly held Swiss values, seriously breach fundamental human rights, or systematically cause severe environmental damage. Nordic financial services group Storebrand Asset Management has already divested its Palantir stake on exactly those grounds.
Guillaume Durin of BreakFree Suisse, who appeared alongside the Minneapolis delegation, stated the campaigners’ position plainly: “Palantir clearly breaches the SNB’s guidelines. The SNB investment gives a halo of respectability to companies like Palantir.”
The campaigners’ core argument is that Palantir’s work for ICE — building surveillance systems used in immigration enforcement operations that have, in their account, contributed to fatal encounters between immigration officials and civilians — constitutes a serious breach of fundamental human rights. They are asking not for a political judgment about immigration policy but for the application of ethical criteria the SNB has already adopted to a company they believe meets those criteria for exclusion.
It is a structurally coherent argument, and it deserves to be evaluated on its merits rather than dismissed as activist overreach. The SNB does maintain an exclusion list. It does apply it through external screening firms. If those screens are functioning correctly, the question of whether Palantir’s ICE contract constitutes a “serious breach of fundamental human rights” under the SNB’s framework is a legitimate question for those screens to answer — and the campaigners are effectively arguing that the screens have not been applied correctly in this case.
The Counterarguments and the Institutional Tension They Reveal
The SNB’s position reflects a genuine institutional tension that does not have a clean resolution.
The first counterargument is practical: the SNB’s equity portfolio is passively managed by market capitalisation. Introducing single-stock divestment decisions based on ethical criteria requires an active judgment process that conflicts with the portfolio’s fundamental design. If the SNB divests Palantir today in response to campaign pressure, it implicitly commits to making active ethical judgments about every subsequent campaign targeting any of the thousands of companies in its portfolio. The precedent is difficult to contain.
The second counterargument is jurisdictional: the SNB is a Swiss institution with a mandate defined by Swiss law, and the activities being protested are US immigration enforcement operations. The SNB is being asked to take a position on US domestic policy through its investment decisions — a form of extraterritorial ethical influence that sits uncomfortably with the principle of central bank political independence.
Palantir’s own position, articulated by CEO Alex Karp, is that the company’s systems include safeguards against government overreach and that its technology — including its ICE surveillance infrastructure — operates within legal parameters. Karp has consistently argued that declining to provide technology to democratic governments is not a neutral act but a decision to cede that infrastructure to less scrupulous suppliers.
None of these counterarguments is conclusive. The human rights exclusion criteria the SNB has adopted do not specify that the violations must occur within Switzerland, or that they must be universally condemned rather than contested. The practical complexity of active management does not override a genuine ethical obligation if one exists. And Karp’s defence of the company’s safeguards does not, by itself, settle the question of whether the outcomes of its work meet the SNB’s exclusion threshold.
What Comes Next
The SNB carries out regular reviews of its holdings and declines to comment on individual assets — a formulation that leaves open the possibility that Palantir’s inclusion is under internal evaluation without publicly committing to any outcome. Storebrand’s divestment provides a precedent from a large institutional investor that concluded the ethical calculus fell on the divestment side.
The Minneapolis delegation’s appearance in Bern was not merely symbolic. It placed a formal record in the SNB’s shareholders’ meeting of a specific ethical objection, grounded in the SNB’s own published criteria, supported by an elected city council’s resolution, and reinforced by a Swiss domestic advocacy organisation. That record now exists, and the SNB’s governance processes will need to account for it in whatever review follows.
The question of whether a central bank’s passive equity portfolio is a morally neutral instrument — or whether it carries ethical responsibility simply by virtue of its scale and the legitimacy it confers on the companies it holds — does not have an obvious answer. But Friday’s proceedings in Bern made clear that the question is no longer theoretical. It arrived in person, with a flight receipt from Minneapolis.
Written by Shalin Soni, CMA specializing in financial analysis, global markets, and corporate strategy, with hands-on experience in financial planning and analytical decision-making.
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Source: Based on Reuters and publicly available information.