>>9
Everything
>>10 said, with one addition: since functional languages (usually) don't have side-effects, they're easy to parallelize. Since we're all heading the direction of many processors and many more processes or threads, this is a boon. It's really easy to throw hardware at a problem.
So functional languages give you robust and scalable systems that are easier to reason about. zOMG ENTERPRISE SCALABLE, they're a perfect fit for things like the financial domain.
>>13
Sorry man, but having visited several companies that write applications for banks, I can tell you it's the engineers who made that decision. Maybe the Swiss are just weird, or maybe these people are more qualified to decide what best fits their needs compared to some random anonymous on 4chan.
I loathe Java with a passion, but I also realise that it probably has its place. I learned that the hard way when speaking to the people above.