01/11/10 Stockholm, Sweden – We’ve previously posted about bank failures and how you can take measures to protect your deposits in coverage of a troubled banks list and of why you may want to close your money market account. Today, at Salon.com we came across an online campaign designed to help bank account holders find trustworthy local banking alternatives.
Dubbed the “Move Your Money” campaign, it provides one tool to consider when you decide which banks are best equipped to protect your money. According to Salon.com:
“Changing your bank, as Felix Salmon observes, “is hard, and people are lazy.” But plugging your zip code into an online database to see if there is a fiscally sound community bank near you is super-easy. And by that metric, the MoveYourMoney campaign cooked up by the Huffington Post, Institutional Risk Analysis (IRA), and the Roosevelt Institute has been a big success, after just one week of existence. In today’s Huffington Post, Dennis Santiago, CEO of IRA, reports that around 340,000 zip codes have been entered into the IRA bank database.”
The underlying motive of the project is to encourage ordinary customers to choose against “too big to fail” banks by taking their funds out of those institutions and putting them into local banks. Salon points out that many customers never chose to be a megabank client in the first place:
“I am currently a customer of Chase, but through no fault of my own. 20 years ago, I opened up an account at a bank called Great Western, which was subsequently snapped up by Washington Mutual, which then famously disappeared into the maw of JPMorganChase. A similar thing happened to my credit card. It is beyond irritating to end up having two of my three most important relationships with financial institutions handled by Chase, without CEO Jamie Dimon ever asking so much as a “by your leave?” So purely on an emotional level, I am attracted by the opportunity to exert some personal control over my bank account destiny.”
More details are available in Salon’s coverage of how to change your bank as well as on the Move Your Money website.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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