Risk Values was conceived to address two specific issues:

1 Know your customer:

a) it is unacceptable to assess the risk posed to any financial institution by any customer based on racial or religious grounds or on any thing which may be an identifier of such: for example, name, place of origin or residential district; and

b) risk assessment at the time of opening, or in the early months or years of, an account must be independent of transaction history - because there is either none or what there is is insufficient .

2. Know your employee

a) profiling according to racial or religious background is wrong and in many countries illegal; and

b) when you take on a new employee, you only have his word and his chosen references as to his behaviour.

LGT, the largest banking Group in Liechtenstein says that the data which was passed to German authorities and came to light in early 2008 was revealed by a senior officer who joined the bank whilst under suspicion of a fraud in Spain, then he committed another fraud in Liechtenstein and then tried to blackmail the bank with threats to release client data.