What has been true for Nestlé, Novartis or Swatch - to name just a few - is also valid for the banks: in today’s competitive marketplace, only the fittest will survive, some of them even becoming global players in the process. b)  Professional skills  Secondly, our finance industry has access to a pool of well-educated, highly-skilled, multilingual, and service-oriented workers who are very familiar with international financial markets. Private banking has a long tradition in Switzerland, and financial advisory services to foreign clients have been a part of the Swiss banking business for generations, literally. c)  Efficient financial infrastructure  Thirdly, besides the availability of a highly professional staff, there is the outstanding efficiency of Switzerland’s financial infrastructure. I am referring here to the so-called “Swiss value chain” which comprises a full set of settlement and payment systems, with their individual parts harmonised in an optimum way. The entire facility consists of a trading platform, a payment-against-delivery system, and a central payment system. A fourth component, a central counterparty, is currently being developed. It might be due to their long tradition of watchmaking that the Swiss have developed a skill to build and interconnect sophisticated settlements systems. In 1987, the Swiss National Bank launched the Swiss Interbank Clearing (SIC), the first RTGS system and precursor of many payment systems around the globe. Shortly after, the Swiss Exchange moved from a traditional “à la criée” procedure to an electronic platform including the automatic transfer of securities.
But, as I showed you, the protection of financial privacy is not an obstacle to an efficient fight against money laundering or the financing of terrorism, nor does it hamper fair tax competition with our neighbours if a withholding tax is implemented along the line of the EU directive. Both the disclosure of certain informations relating to bank clients and the protection of privacy in the financial sphere arise from fundamental ethical convictions that are worth protecting. I am confident that with a frank dialogue and mutual effort to understand each other’s position, the common values of the Swiss and British financial centres will again come to the forefront. In particular, it is our predominant joint interest to see the very demanding standards that we have set for our own financial industry become the world-wide accepted rules. The long history of our financial centres and the large experience of our banking industry should give us a natural leadership role in this respect. BIS Review 13/2002  7