Silence Is a Signature

Who watches a Swiss private bank account? Not the bank, unless the contract says so. Geneva lawyers and wealth analysts spelled this out last month, and no new law was involved. The rule is old. Swiss banks' general terms give clients 30 days to dispute a statement, sometimes only 7, after which silence counts as approval. Lawyers call it the ratification fiction. Judges enforce the small print: last year the Federal Supreme Court, Switzerland's highest court, left a client to absorb transfers from an account opened on a form he says was forged.

A statement can mislead without printing a single false number. One client lost seven figures over five years while the bank's report showed +16%. Another read +25% for a real gain of 8%. The bank picked a formula that ignored when money came in and went out, the way a fund reports the return of a unit rather than of the investor who bought at the top. Technically correct. Practically a lie. Yet a client who set the closing value against the sums he had paid in would have seen the hole in minutes. Elsewhere, one line reading "Pledge in favor of other" sat on a statement and covered transfers that were plain fraud.

Custody is not surveillance, and the contract decides who watches. Under a discretionary mandate, where the banker picks the investments, the manager must keep the portfolio inside the agreed brief. Under execution-only, where the bank merely carries out orders, the institution owes no monitoring at all. Advisory sits in between, and disputes breed there: general terms telling the client to check every transaction, an annex to the same contract telling the banker to raise the alarm. Two documents. One signature. Opposite answers.

London settles the same question by statute instead of contract. UK banks must, as a rule, refund unauthorised payments reported within 13 months, and since October 2024 they also repay customers tricked into wiring money themselves, up to £85K. Brussels grants EU payment users the same window. For a pensioner talked out of £3K, that is a real net. For a client with CHF20M under mandate in Geneva, £85K is a rounding error, and the London reflex that the bank pays was built for somebody else.

Some clients still ask for hold mail, letters kept in a drawer at the branch so nothing reaches home. Swiss judges generally treat a letter in that drawer as delivered.

Switzerland is harsher, and more honest. The Swiss model tells the client on page one who watches what and holds both parties to it, rather than stretching a safety net sized for pensioners. Anyone who wants a watchman can sign a discretionary mandate and pay for one. Everyone else is asked for nothing more heroic than opening the envelope. A statement nobody opens is a contract somebody else is signing.