For years, banks forced customers to bend their money habits into the forms and methods that were available at the bank. Customers could choose from a limited selection of accounts, and were forced to learn the bank's rules for managing their money. New technology is providing a way to make banking customer centric. Now we just need banks to catch the drift.

I'm a big del.icio.us user, and I love keeping track of my bookmarks with tags instead of folders. What I would really like from banks is a way to tag my money. When my wife and I save for things, we want to keep track our money so that we can measure progress. Many money market accounts have a $1,000 minimum to get the base interest rate, and we've discovered that it is common to limit the number of accounts that a single customer can have. We create multiple accounts so that we can keep track of money.

So here is what tagging money looks like: In their online interface, I can tag a transaction. I can run reports based on tags. When interest is deposited into the account, allocate a portion of the interest payment to each tag. This can all happen in one transaction (from the bank's point of view), but will just carry a little annotation along with it. I can create a tag for something I'm saving for (a car, for example), and tag deposits with 'car'. Each month, the car tag grows a little from interest, and I can easily view the money that I currently have saved.

If my bank offered this, I wouldn't need so many accounts!