ZURICH. Not long ago, a Swiss banker could promise a client two things: discretion and safety. The first promise is gone, legislated away by foreign governments and signed away by our own. The second took a beating on a weekend in March 2023, when the country's second-largest bank was sold over the telephone. What, exactly, is left to sell?
The answer ought to be the thing that should have been the product all along: trust, understood not as secrecy but as boring, verifiable reliability. The industry's future depends on whether it can build that. The early signs are mixed.
It is worth remembering what secrecy was. The 1934 law had decent origins, protecting the savings of people fleeing persecution, before it hardened into a business model. For decades the model worked magnificently, and its defenders were sincere when they called privacy a Swiss value. But a value that depends on other countries' blind eyes is not a value; it is an arbitrage, and arbitrages close.
The automatic exchange of information, in force since 2018, ended the era for good. The interesting fact is what did not happen next. The money largely stayed. Clients, it turned out, wanted stability, competence and convenient time zones more than they wanted invisibility, which suggests the industry never understood its own appeal.
The sceptics have a case worth hearing. Trust, they say, is the word banks reach for when the numbers disappoint; performance is what clients actually buy, and the performance of Swiss wealth management remains world class. By this reading, the hand-wringing about trust is sentimentality, and the March weekend proved the system works, since the depositors were made whole.
There is something in this, and also something complacent. Depositors were made whole because the state arranged a rescue it had sworn never to arrange, with emergency law written over a weekend and a marriage no one had planned. A system that survives by improvisation is not proving its strength; it is spending its reserves of credibility.
What the debate gets wrong is the belief that the secrecy era ended because the world bullied us. It ended because concealment had become the product, and a product built on what cannot be said aloud eventually corrupts the seller. The fines, the deferred prosecutions and the slow reputational bleed were not bad luck. They were the business model coming home.
The cost of getting the next era wrong is concentration. One bank now towers over the domestic landscape, too big to fail and too big to save, and every serious person in Bern knows it. If that bank ever stumbles, the question will not be about trust as a slogan. It will be about whether the state can pay.
The better path is dull, which is the point. Capital requirements that bite, competition policy that takes the new giant seriously, and a culture in which the first instinct after a mistake is disclosure rather than defence. Trust is not a marketing claim. It is the residue of candour, repeated for years.
The state has its own part to play, and it is not to be the industry's marketing department. When officials boast about financial-centre rankings, they tie the country's dignity to the sector's quarterly mood. A little distance would serve both sides: the banks would be freer to be boring, and the government freer to supervise them.
Other industries have made this turn. The watchmakers stopped selling chronometry when quartz made it cheap and started selling craft instead, honestly described. Banking's equivalent of craft is exactly the unfashionable stuff: custody that holds, advice paid for as advice rather than as product placement, and books that can survive daylight.
Discretion is gone, and good riddance to what it became. Safety turned out to be conditional, and should be priced as such. What remains is the oldest promise in banking, the one the secrecy years let us skip: your money is here, and here is the proof. The banks that learn to say that plainly will own the next century.