Switzerland uses more than 100 bilateral agreements with Brussels to give various industries unrestricted access to the single market and in return it adheres to core EU principles including the free movement of people.
But financial services are not among the web of Swiss-EU accords as, for years, Switzerland's banks viewed deeper EU ties with suspicion, fearing they could jeopardize secrecy rules which helped the country become a global tax haven.
The landscape changed markedly after the financial crisis, however, when a global clamp-down on tax evasion eroded Swiss banks' revenue and led to them seeking better access to the EU single market and the business opportunities there.Lack of such access has contributed to banking jobs moving abroad with the number of employees at banks in Switzerland falling 22 percent since 2009, according to the Swiss Bankers' Association (SBA).
In the first half of 2016, the number of employees in the sector in Switzerland fell by 3,454, an SBA survey found. By contrast Swiss banks hired a net total of over 6,700 people abroad.
Britain could be hit harder than Switzerland by a lack of single market access. The UK is a global powerhouse of investment banking, for which passporting is more important than in private banking, in which Swiss banks traditionally specialize.
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