We work with organizations in highly regulated industries — from life sciences to finance — to navigate complexity, stay compliant, and still move forward with agility.
In case you have missed the Eurovision Intro Song of 2025, here are some facts about our home’s industries.
Switzerland is home to some of the world’s most highly regulated industries: banking and insurance, life sciences and MedTech, energy, telecom, healthcare, and food. These sectors shape the economy and they operate under strict rules that demand precision, trust, and adaptability.LifeSciences, from drug development to medical devices, is responsible for more than 40% of Swiss exports. Being the home of more than 240 banks, like UBS, the finance sector contributes to 9% of Swiss GDP. With the reputation of the Swiss railway to always be on time, transportation systems extend and support the EU-vision of sustainable travels replacing flights with rail travel to London.
Operating in complex and regulated environments comes with the unique challenge to balance acting in a compliant and regulated way versus innovating to stay competitive. In our last ten years working in life sciences we had the pleasure of working with creative leaders seeing compliance by design as an opportunity and enabling the whole team to focus on delivering value.
At tostep, we work organizations in those industries and enable them to deliver value more quickly and meaningfully. Whether in pharmaceuticals, financial services, or public utilities, we bring clarity to complexity, structure to chaos, and enable teams to focus on what really matters: creating meaningful work and sustainable impact within demanding frameworks.
Our services include:
Redesign organizational structures and workflows to be both compliant and adaptive.
Support leaders to build trustful, cross-functional teams that can navigate audits, standards, and regulations without losing momentum.
Lead complex digital initiatives and enable internal emplyees to focus on delivering output to their clients
Apply agile methods (like OKR) at scale, adapted for regulated industries.
The result: In the daily buzz of the daily operations, like R&D activities, clinical trial management and the like, we set focus and deliver strategic outcomes through strategic initiatives. We engage the internal team and subject matter expert in a way, that they can give valuable input but are distracted as less as possible from their day to day important activities.
Read more on working with R&D in our blogpost
Case Study
The context: A global life sciences company, the current economic global situation is causing massive impact on the business model. A new regulation requires the company to assess business process impact, document compliance requirements and align cross-Organization to decide on a way forward.
Our role:
We are facilitating a team of cross functional and legal experts to act on an interpreted version of the government rule. Business critical decisions are prioritized and routed to the experts. Leadership teams are kept informed.
The result: Improved audit readiness and a global aligned approach and process to apply the regulation
Besides the obvious part – the regulations and inspections – it is also a lived experience and mindset within the company. Touching on critical value chains or business processes may result in big rounds of signature reviews and leadership approvals needed.
Every industry will have their regulation and rules to follow, however in a highly regulated one, the stakes might be higher for not following them.
We have worked with organizations in life sciences, pharma, healthcare and energy. We are currently looking into extending to work with finance and education (a not so regulated, but important industry). The patterns are similar: strong compliance demands, but a need for speed and adaptability.
It can, if treated as an additional burden and with a too risk averse mindset. Technologies and pragmatic application of compliance can help to even accelerate process (e.g. when information is stored in a structured way due to GxP requirements and can be reused)
The PEACE method we developed centers around the idea that we are working on a dedicated problem set and enable the working teams to deliver change in a structured way.
As a boutique consultancy with our vision in mind to create more meaningful work environments and our experience with those industries we are creating unique solutions and processes with our clients. Due to our partner network we remain flexible to also support bigger projects if needed.