Switzerland Today
Greetings from Bern!
Here are the latest news and views from Switzerland on Wednesday.
In the news: The Basel carnival can take place again after a two-year Covid-enforced break, the local government and carnival committee decided today.
- This year’s FasnachtExternal link, as carnival is known, will run from 4am on March 7 (the Monday after Ash Wednesday) until 4am three days later. The lantern exhibition on Tuesday will also take place. However, the traditional parades on Monday and Wednesday afternoon and the main musical parade on Tuesday remain cancelled.
- An online signature campaign has been launched to re-admit Swiss and British researchers to the European Union Horizon programme. It calls for “open and barrier-free collaboration among Europe’s research and innovation actors”. The campaign is in response to the EU downgrading Switzerland to non-associated status in the programme, which hands out grants and gives access to prestigious scientific projects.
- Olympic medal update:Skier Wendy HoldenerExternal link has won bronze in the women’s slalom, for Switzerland’s fourth medal at the Beijing Winter Olympics. She joins Beat Feuz (gold) and Lara Gut-Behrami and Mathilde Gremaud (both bronze).
Forced closures of bank accounts, exorbitant management fees – for years the Swiss Abroad have felt mistreated by traditional banking institutions. Are neobanks the solution?
A new generation of digital banks, known as neobanks, has appeared on the scene determined to reinvent a Swiss banking market that was resting on its laurels. Can they better meet the financial needs of Swiss citizens living abroad?
On the downside, they mostly provide only a few simple services, such as payments or a basic account overview. Many don’t offer credit or mortgage options, and they have no actual branches and sometimes no real advisers, just a chatbot (a chat window driven by algorithms). What’s more, all transactions are done via smartphone app, which represents a hurdle for people who are less comfortable with new technologies. And because of their purely digital structure, there’s also the risk that hacking or a bug could make the app unavailable. Plus, many neobanks limit their activities to just a few countries, mainly within the eurozone.
That said, there are many advantages. The most obvious is not having to turn up in person to open an account. Other aspects, such as speedy implementation of payments and transfers, very low management fees, generally advantageous exchange rates and multi-currency accounts, are also bound to appeal to the Swiss diaspora.
More
Happy birthday to former UN prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who turns 75 today.
The lawyer from Italian-speaking canton Ticino was chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 1999 to 2007 and served in the same role for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) from 1999 to 2003.
More recently, Del Ponte was a UN special investigator on war crimes in Syria. However, she resigned from the position in 2017 out of frustration at UN inaction.
In 2018 she spoke about her disappointment and anger at what she considered her failures in investigating human rights violations and war crimes.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
