Recently American Express announced a new and unique service that provides American Express Charge Cardmembers with the ability to set spending limits for additional cards on their account. This allows them to control expenditures in for instance a household with kids, nannies and helpers.

How does it work? The primary card holder allows others (people who are at least fifteen years old) to spend only the amount they’ve approved. He can modify the spending amount anytime, online or over the phone.

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Yesterday, The Dutch SNS Bank opened the first of its ‘SNS Shops’ in Haarlem, the Netherlands. All 150 SNS branch offices are to be replaced by 300 SNS Shops in the span of a couple of years.

The SNS Shops are primarily geared towards offering information and do not provide the possibility to deposit or withdraw money. This is a deliberate decision, as setting up the infrastructure to handle cash money has become increasingly expensive, while less and less people make use of this service.

Instead, the SNS Shop is presented as a very open and easily accessible place that you can pop into to get advice, buy a product or get help with online banking. And with opening hours extending into evenings and weekends, and twice as many SNS Shops planned as there are branch offices, accessibility is further increased.

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“Don’t blame me… I bank locally” reads the bumper sticker doled out for free by the Florence, Massachusetts based Florence Savings Bank. Their message: it was the big Wallstreet banks that brought on the crisis, small local banks are not to blame.

“There has been so much negative broad-brush painting of ‘banks’ in the media,” says Doug Burr, senior vice president of the Florence Savings Bank, “that many customers have been asking about the bank’s strength.” Which led the bank to communicate more clearly to their customers what the difference is between them and the big players. Small banks don’t deal with complex derivatives or aggressive trading, they are much too conservative and too boring for that, representatives of the sector point out.

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Reduce the influence shareholders have on banks by 50% and instead appoint a council that keeps watch over the public interest.

This way, not only individual interests but also the greater common good is taken into consideration when a bank sets out a course for the future, say Prof. Michiel Scheltema and Arjan Scheltema.

Michiel Scheltema is former chairman of the Dutch ‘Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid’ (Scientific Council for Government Policy) and together with his son Arjan Scheltema he wrote an advisory report for the ‘Vereniging voor Effectenrecht’ (Association for Securities Law) in which they plead the above measures.

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Governments should stop giving financial support to suffering banks. Let the banks topple over and let corporations find the money they need for investments elsewhere, for instance by issuing bonds. Banks can then focus on providing basic financial services, such as transaction services.

These are the views of Aaron Brown, US based fund manager and financial risk expert, according to a recent article in Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad.

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The US Bank has recently tapped into the consumer’s desire to decrease healthcare costs and increase control.

They did this by creating the Health Savings Account (HSA), which is paired with a High-Deductible Health Plan (HDHP).

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Since a couple of decades, the paper money in your pocket is no longer backed by gold bullion in the national reserve’s safes. It is instead backed by the government’s assurance that the printed paper is accepted currency for taxes.

The value of money is established by governments, or to be more precise: by central banks. This allows central banks to control the rate of inflation and thus maintain economic stability. A growing group of people however are advocating a return to the gold standard, where every Euro and Dollar represents an equal value in gold.

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Banks and financial service providers should do their best to address ethnic groups that speak non-native languages.

This is extra urgent if they’re still unfamiliar with the financial services that are offered.

To do this, not only should these groups be addressed in their own language, but also through the specific information channels they use. The question is of course whether the potential revenue increase outweighs the effort made in specialized ad campaigns.

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Traditionally, banks have presented themselves as solid and unyielding organizations. Even the traditional architecture of banks reflected this: solid buildings with stone pillars and heavy doors. This image of solidity provided an air of reliability, the idea that your money was safe.

Of course this image has been severely battered over the past months, and banks all over the world have to find a new way to relate to their clients. Still, many banks have trouble letting go of their old ways, and continue to position themselves as fixed institutions rather than flexible financial service providers.

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Illegal skimming, copying magnetic stripe cards to produce duplicates and pillage the associated bank accounts, is a big expense for banks. That is why the implementation of the secure EMV-chip – a replacement for current magnetic stripe cards – should be standardized across Europe as quickly as possible. Luckily, we’re well under way.

Before we delve further into the advantages of the EMV-chip, first some background information.

In March 2006, European banks agreed to phase-in the EMV payment standard. Currently, European countries are currently in full swing implementing this standard in a project named Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA).

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