Our set up fee to open a personal current account is only 499 Euro 

The asset protection advantage. If your goal is to protect assets from frivolous litigation or seizures, Austria has much to offer. In Austrian courts, the loser must pay the winner's legal bills, courts can't award punitive damages in civil disputes, and all relevant docu­ments must be translated into German by an official translator. And, there is no automatic recognition or enforcement of U.S. civil judgments. 

The tradition of bank secrecy in Austria is thus very different from that in the United States, where information about your bank account can be bought or sold without your knowledge, consent, or compensation.  The practical consequence for foreign depositors is that once you've opened an Austrian bank account, your assets are, for practical purposes, "off the radar screen." That doesn't mean there won't be a paper trail if someone wants to follow it.  Nor does it mean that the account will necessarily be a secret from tax authorities in your own country. But it does mean that if someone wants to sue you, and performs a domestic asset search to determine if you have recoverable assets, your offshore monies won't show up. "No recoverable assets" usually means "no lawsuit," particularly if (as in the United States) the attorney handling the matter is paid only a portion of what's recovered

Investments in an Austrian bank account are also covered by a deposit guarantee scheme.  Per depositor, deposits are guaranteed up to €20,000 in the event of bankruptcy, receivership, or discontinuation of payments.  (And, as I mentioned earlier, assets held in “safe custody” by the bank (e.g., securities purchased through an Austrian bank and held by the bank in a “custodial ac­count”) must be returned to the owner, regardless of their value.)

A bank must maintain capital reserves to remain solvent in the event of a loss in the value of its underlying assets and to withstand a "bank run" by its depositors. In the event of bankruptcy, depositors' funds rank in priority before capital, so depositors only lose money if the bank's losses ex­ceed its capital.  The higher the bank's capital ratio, the less likely it is that deposi­tors will lose money.  

For years, the United States has tried to convince Austria to ratify a one-sided agreement called a Tax Information Exchange Agreement or TIEA.
TIEAs are designed to permit the IRS to engage in "fishing expeditions" into offshore bank accounts. Many countries have been strong-armed into signing these agreements after being threat¬ened by the U.S. Treasury—but not Austria, which has the financial and diplomatic clout to resist such overtures.
 

Under both aa mutual legal assistance treaty and a tax treaty, unless the IRS Criminal Investigation Di­vision (CID) opens a criminal tax inquiry into the affairs of a U.S. taxpayer with Austrian invest­ments, no information exchange can take place.  CID investigations are not nearly as common as civil tax investigations, and are reserved for serious tax offenses.  According to a senior official I spoke to in the Austrian Tax Ministry, requests for information are restricted to cases of criminal tax fraud or money laundering.