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Sounds good, but banks seem not keen on the idea. Industry-wide back-office projects have rarely taken off in Switzerland. Last year for instance, UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti launched a transactions bank – the «Superbank» project – an idea shelved quickly.

Apart from the more traditional concerns about banking secrecy, there’s another more modern issue holding back such ideas: banks have discovered big data as a treasure ready to be exploited and are carefully guarding over the information collected from clients. The wishes of their customers follow in second place.

An EU Trend to Watch

A mistake, PwC’s Weiss says. In the EU, companies have teamed up and made their data available to lawyers or fiduciaries. They only work with banks that agree to received data directly from the lawyers. In light of this trend, it would surely make sense to meet the concerns of corporate clients, who after all are key clients in private banking.

The advisory firm PwC is convinced that it is technically possible to introduce such a central collection unit and questions of banking secrecy could be solved as well. The innovation would also signify a first step toward the key issue in banking – private client data. There have been attempts to solve that problem too, with Banque Syz founder Eric Syz looking to install a client information center for compliance purposes, KYC for short. The center would collect all the information available about a client, regardless of his bank. Switzerland would thus become the Swiss fortress, where know-your-customer information is kept safe, he told finews.com in 2017.

The idea didn’t make it beyond the initial phase of tentative talks.

Swiss ID a Stepping Stone

Weiss, the expert at PwC, is also cautious. He says that the Data Utility ought to distinguish between corporate and private clients, at least in an initial phase. He argues that it isn’t clear whether the exchange with banks in personal banking is intense enough to justify the institution of a central registry.

The digital identity is far more important in this segment, he argues and banks have been active promoting the Swiss ID as an important stepping stone.