History comes full circle on Swiss

“It's embarrassing and painful if you have cases like that but out of 330 banks it's just three cases in two years,” Nason said.

Experts nonetheless highlighted the harm for the reputation of Swiss banking and the psychological value of the bank secrecy banner.

“This component is pretty well the most important one,” tax lawyer, Philippe Kenel, said. “Whether the rumors are true or not, it's clear that trust is affected.”

The German case has also fuelled an expanding array of sceptics across the political spectrum in Switzerland, while Swiss Finance Minister, Hans Rudolf Merz, steered clear of mentioning sanctions with a “trusted” neighbour — unlike with France over HSBC.

And while Merz insisted that the Swiss would not be helping any German tax probes based on the stolen data, he underlined that “the German government is free to use acquired data inside its own country.”

“It is not in the interest of Switzerland to attract undeclared foreign funds,” he said.

The overall cost of dents in secrecy is hard to pin down.

“It's impossible to put a price on it, it's like one of four wheels on a car,” Nason said.

The SBA says more than half of securities in Swiss banks are foreign held, but just 17.5 percent in recent years belonged to foreign private clients while the bulk came from institutional investors with little concern for secrecy.

Eric Jondeau, of the Swiss Institute for Banking and Finance, estimated that losses in wealth management -- where Swiss banking is ranked third in the world -- should not exceed five billion dollars, out of hundreds of billions of foreign assets.

But Dutch authorities alone said that of the 2.2 billion euros declared during a recent tax amnesty, most was stashed away in accounts in Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

The Swiss banking establishment also highlights new business with emerging markets and Asia, and a smaller role for Europe.

The country's biggest private bank, exclusively serving wealthy clients, Julius Baer on Friday noted an increase in new money and deposits last year, with “continued strong inflows from emerging markets and in particular Asia.”

“The big potential of the future is Russia, Central Asia, the Middle East and above all Asia,” Kenel said.

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