Time was when private bankers were steely chaps with clipped Germanic accents and starched white collars. Their charge was to preserve family wealth from generation to generation against the ravages of war and financial upheaval.
That was then. The most recent events mean that Asia faces yet another banking debacle. The business of managing extremely rich people's money is set to be unwrapped following the apparent breakdown of organisational systems within a leading bank.
The question for Merrill Lynch is whether its prominent place in Asia's vast private banking market is undermined as a result. The industry as a whole faces painful self-examination with the old demon of internal controls once again top of the agenda.
Investment banks under detailed public scrutiny have become an all too familiar sight. Merrill Lynch knows the heat of bad publicity, being a key adviser to the bankrupt Orange County.
Yet, it is in Asia that many of the big banking fiascos of recent years have occurred. Those were dominated by traders, gambling institutions' own capital for profit. While fundamentally different, this case raises serious compliance and supervision issues. Moves to reorganise Merrill Lynch's private banking department must be considered nothing more than a minimum response after the event.
For sure, it is difficult to prevent such things as forgery of signatures and documents. But what of the conditions breeding such behaviour? Failings within Jardine Fleming were only revealed after last year's fund management scandal. The breakdown of internal controls within Barings showed a similar pattern of poor supervision.
Plenty of US investment bankers reckoned they were different. Coming from a tightly regulated market with sophisticated compliance systems it seemed that unauthorised trading was very much an Anglo-Japanese phenomenon.