The financial services industry has much to gain from the green movement, and we're now seeing the fruits of such thinking starting to suffuse operations, products and of course marketing.

With that in mind, I'd like to highlight a recent special feature on Top Green Initiatives of the Finance Sector, written by FierceFinance editor Alicia Caramenico. 

The report suggests that green awareness goes beyond investing and the high hope that Clean Energy becomes the next great boom, sort of like biotech and the dot.coms of yesteryear. The awareness has reached into the executive offices, as it becomes clear that in so many ways, green makes good business sense. When it comes to data centers, the appeal is obvious. Why wouldn't you want to cut costs, reduce power consumption, shrink the physical footprint and get a PR boost out of your efforts. The investment raitonale is pretty compelling, and we're seeing a host of banks jump on the trend.  

There are other signs of green awareness, some of them somewhat subtle. The online banking boom has been underway for a while now, paving the way toward more mobile banking applications. More banks might be willing to make the green aspects of all of this a marketing issue. It may be that customers really respond to the idea that banking online, giving up all those paper account statements, can help save the planet as well as make your life easier.

If shareholders ever decide to make green initiatives an issue, many banks and other financial firms will hopefully have a nice story to tell. - Jim