Five minutes ago, I snuck a peek at the Masters Leaderboard. While rooting for David Duval to find his swing again, I noticed the CitiBank ad shown beside this post.

The interesting thing isn’t the ad; it’s the product: an e-Savings account, a la ING Direct and Sunmark Credit Union (see this Open Source CU post from a few months back).

Bold prediction time: Just like credit unions and banks are starting to model products after Bank of America’s innovative Keep the Change program (see another earlier post on this), you’ll see a lot of CUs and banks soon realizing that offering puny 1% returns on vanilla savings accounts won’t cut it in today’s financial marketplace.

I believe this goes right along with Henry Wirz’s latest CUES Skybox post, where he points out, “Banks have far stronger marketing and lately they have been very innovative with new products and services that they widely promote.” (You’ve got to read the whole thing. Best CUES Skybox post ever.)

Among all the recent “America’s savings rate is negative” news, Bank of America, ING, CitiBank, and Sunmark CU are seizing a huge opportunity. People generally understand the importance of saving money – and they’ll do so when their financial institutions provide can’t-miss savings mechanisms (think like BofA) and returns that don’t require a jumbo CD purchase.