Can Banks Still Keep a Secret?

An insight into bank secrecy in major jurisdictions, complemented by chapters on privacy, data protection, conflict of laws and exchange of information.

A book for lawyers, bank counsel, policymakers, academics and students seeking a holistic understanding of a bank's duty to keep customers' information confidential and the conflicting right or duty to disclose information. It offers critical analysis and highlights problematic areas in privacy, data protection, conflict of laws and exchange of information.The duty to keep customer information confidential affects banks on a daily basis. Bank secrecy regimes around the world differ and multi-national banks can find themselves in conflicted positions with a duty to protect information in one jurisdiction and a duty to disclose it in another. This problem has been heightened by the international trend promoting information disclosure in order to combat tax evasion, money laundering and terrorist financing. The US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is perhaps the most well-known. At the same time, data protection legislation is proliferating around the world. This book offers a holistic treatment of bank secrecy in major financial jurisdictions around the world, east and west, by jurisdictional experts as well as chapters by subject specialists covering the related areas of confidentiality in its broader privacy context, data protection, conflicts of laws, and exchange of information for the purposes of combatting international crime.