He shakes his head good-naturedly as he talks from his office in Lausanne. No, no, no, not at all. They keep repeating it ad nauseum. And in our popular culture, misinformation about Swiss banks is repeated ad nauseum. Swiss law prohibits the bank not only from revealing your balance, but from acknowledging that you're a customer or revealing when you made your last transaction.
Bankers can go to jail for violating Swiss privacy laws.
Banking secrecy evaporates if a Swiss judge is convinced that you have used a Swiss bank to commit a serious crime such as financial fraud, embezzling, money laundering or drug dealing. It has to be a major crime under Swiss law, even if it was committed elsewhere. On the other hand, it's not a major crime in Switzerland to hide money from an ex-spouse or the taxman, so an American divorce attorney and the IRS can't pry information from a Swiss bank. All men may be created equal, but not all Swiss bank accounts are created equal. You'll find private banking, retail banking, named accounts, numbered accounts.