Swiss Banking By TigerTom.
The knowledge is that an offshore bank is a bank located outside the country of residence of the depositor, typically located in a low tax jurisdiction, and providing financial and legal advantages.
Most investors have a marked preference for Swiss Banking; although people have in mind Swiss Bank Accounts are only accessible for the richest men on earth or dishonest government officials worldwide.
Being the most renown offshore banking service, Swiss banking is full of myths that makes it hard to find which is the truth and which is a lie, but of course nothing to do with Hollywood fiction suggesting that only illegal or suspicious activities requires an offshore account in Switzerland.
All people wanting Swiss banking services should approach to the SBA.
The Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) represent the interests of all banks located in Switzerland dealing with the local authorities and those abroad, besides of helping individual investors and corporate entities to understand the Swiss Banking services, promoting the country image as a financial center throughout the world.
The SBA was founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1912 and today has near 370 associated banks and approximately 9,200 individual members. This association promotes the growth of the offshore services opening a dialogue with both, the critical public in Switzerland and worldwide, developing the system of self-regulation in consultation with regulatory bodies.
However, the Swiss Bankers Association is not only in charge of Swiss banking regulations, but also advising its members, supporting the training of junior staff to establish executives in the banking industry and facilitating the exchange of information and knowledge between banks and bank employees. This way the association coordinates joint projects undertaken by the Swiss banks.
Swiss bankers are under obligation to keep any and all information about clients and their accounts strictly confidential. Swiss Banking secrecy is among the strictest in the world coming from an old historical tradition established in Swiss by law. Swiss bankers are under obligation to keep all information about clients and their accounts strictly confidential.
Thanks to these actions Swiss Banking have higher confidentiality among all the other offshore banks, but the Swiss bank law regulation on information that may be given out makes untraceable the source of any money placed on deposit with a Swiss bank, and even to the extent of not confirming whether a named person holds an account or not, so this is why it many people hold the belief of "suspicious" activities behind Swiss accounts.
In recent times Swiss banks were flagged as distrustful entities due to the fact of the money that Nazis plundered from defeated countries, their actions towards Jewish account holders and due many Nazi's prisoners were held in Swiss banks.
Swiss Bank Secrecy was introduced in 1934 as a measure to protect accounts of Germans, especially German Jews, from Nazi confiscation, adding a special section which makes it a criminal offense, with the possibility of an individual going to jail, for the bank or its employee or agent to improperly divulge any confidential information
These facts caused an international pressure that made Switzerland lower its restrictions in 2003, allowing access to international police seeking information about suspected criminals.
With this exception only, Swiss Banking accounts still provide the maximum degree of confidentiality.
