Feeling like you have no influence over your bank? Check out the story of students who, by organizing on facebook, managed to get HSBC to change their plans to charge interest on overdrafts. The smallest, most innocuous sounding changes in bank policy can result in extremely negative consequences for unsuspecting customers. Let’s hope that all financial institutions start feeling pressure from social networks to provide better services.

Please feel free to post links to any facebook/orkut/myspace/etc groups that are promoting the interests of bank customers. We’d also love to hear about any financial institutions that have particularly impressed you with customer-friendly policies.

It’s been a long time coming, but the first public update to Moneydance 2007 is now here. This update includes a bunch of new features and a lot of bug fixes or minor interface improvements. If you are already running Moneydance you can click on the “check for new updates/extensions” link on the main screen or the updater extension.

This update is free for everyone who has purchased a license on or after January 1, 2004. The upgrade is half price ($15) for all other customers and a paltry $29.99 for everyone else. Of course, we have a free download and a very liberal trial period to let you get a good feel for what Moneydance can do before committing.

Some of the highlights of the update:

• Added print function in account and category list windows
• Added Open Recent sub-menu with recently opened files
• Added non-prorated budget interval option
• Added batch change feature to quickly change certain fields for many transactions at once
• Improved matching algorithm for downloaded transactions
• Improved interface for editing split transactions
• Many minor interface improvements and bug fixes

For the full list of changes, click the read more link below.
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