Despite all the thrillers you may have read featuring Swiss banks, they are not all about secrecy. In fact, like MI5 these days, they mostly have websites and you can find them on the internet.

In the latest research from Sitemorse, we took a close look at the websites of nearly 250 of the best-known Swiss banks to see which of them were the most efficient.

The Swiss financial centre, with banking as the leading sector, is of major international importance and among the global market leaders in many areas. The financial centre makes a substantial contribution to gross value added in Switzerland, and hence to the prosperity of the entire Swiss population.

Swiss banks are stringently licenced and can therefore certainly be counted amongst the safest in the world. But despite their secret reputation, anyone can open a Swiss Bank account and like anyone else, they compete for clients.

We looked at the top sites and found a very mixed picture when it comes to functional excellence, compliance, performance and accessibility. We have carried out quarterly benchmarks of the banking sector in Switzerland for the last three years, and as usual, we found a small number of high-performing websites and many not so good. Our benchmark tests are carried out by software and we don’t judge a site on design or content, but purely on how well its users will find it works.

Privately-owned Nordkop Bank AG tops the Sitemorse benchmark, with an 8.5 score of a possible ten marks. The Zurich-based bank started life as part of engineering firm ABB and then GE, but was sold to a consortium of private investors in 2003. CEO Niklaus Hasler and his small team pride themselves on a lack of bureaucracy and the bank’s website is small and almost perfectly-formed, with big improvements made in a lot of areas since Sitemorse has included the bank in its benchmarks.

Ersparniskasse Speicher, named after the town in which it’s based, is second in the table with 8.27 out of 10, and Geneva-based Banque Cramer & Cie SA third. This family-owned bank, which also has offices in Lugano, scored 8.19 in our benchmark.

Sitemorse regularly conducts surveys of the websites of businesses and organisations, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. Full results from this and other recent surveys can be seen on our website.

The news is not all good for the Swiss Banks, and we found that, overall, most had poorly-performing websites. You might not think that to look at some of them, particularly that of the Kredietbank (Suisse) SA, which has the dubious distinction of being right at the bottom of our table. The site is modern, visually appealing and has plenty of information. But we found every page on the site fails basic accessibility tests (now a legal requirement) and all of its functionality falls far short of target, meaning that it only scores less than two of ten. our ratings. This site is not alone, and in total 120 banks in this survey scored less than five out of ten.

Sitemorse concludes: Like most sectors we study, the Swiss Banking websites provide a mixed picture, with some much more efficient than others. Since the Internet is now a vital source of information, everybody, especially bank customers and prospective customers, need well-performing websites. Swiss Banks may still maintain a reputation for secrecy and glamour, but their websites need to be available and working properly 24 hours a day.

About our surveys

For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking.

Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility.

Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best.

Sitemorse is the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence.

Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control.

We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools to help web editors and managers, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free (our web managers toolkit). All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites.

Technical Data

This survey took place on 6th January 2012 and involved benchmarking almost 200,000 URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for the site of Banca Zarattini & Co, with more than 43,000 functional failures. Fastest overall response time from any site was that of the HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA.

More information

• Click here to see our ranking methodology page – how we come to our conclusions