Data on an individual Swiss bank account valued at €7,500

It’s now official we can put a price on bank account data. Well as long as the bank account is held by a Swiss bank and the account belongs to a German tax payer who hasn’t paid enough tax.

German authorities have confirmed that they have purchased another CD with Swiss bank account details. This data has been acquired via shady methods from Zurich based Julius Baer Group Ltd according to the Bloomberg web site (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-18/germany-buying-more-stolen-data-as-tax-agreement-with-switzerland-nears.html). The German government has paid 1.5 million euros for details on 200 bank accounts.  If we do the math’s we get a figure of 7,500 euros for each account.

One of the issues that accountants have with treating data as an asset rather than expensing it (which is current practice) is that there is not a viable market to buy and sell data. Maybe this is the start of one? Probably not but does start to raise the question of what value to place on an individual’s bank account data. We now have a number of aspects in which to measure value:

• Tax collection by government bodies
• Fraud and theft (also seems in this case to relate to the first point) and general data protection as banks have been finded for failing in this area.
• Up sell and cross sell opportunities