Congratulations to my client Carol Realini on the publication of her new book “BANKrupt: Why Banking Is Broken. How It Can Be Transformed” (Searching Finance, 2012). This powerful call to action is not only an expose of the corruption of today’s big banks (writing on that topic alone would be too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel) but it reveals amazing transformations that are happening right now overseas, particularly in India and Kenya. In India, where the population is 1.2 billion, hundreds of millions of people do not have bank accounts. But nearly a billion people have cell phones (or mobiles, as they’re called). The key to turning hundreds of millions of rural Indians into banking customers is an effective bank-government partnership (imagine – the federal government getting involved!) to first launch the Universal Identification Project (UID) so that the identity of every bank customer can be verified, and then to create a mobile-based banking system that can profit from small transactions and deposits.

The banking model being created right now in India might very well leapfrog over the US system, which is designed to profit only from big depositors and squeeze usurious fees from everyone else. “BANKrupt” is a powerful book that everyone with a bank account should read.

Based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Thomas Hauck provides a full range of freelance ghostwriting and editing services for both new and established authors.