Guest's notes: Jeff Carter

As I was talking with John and Adaora this morning, I stepped back for a moment from the here-and-now of the economic crisis and glanced at the sun coming up against some clouds on the horizon.

It struck me that when this financial storm passes — and it will, eventually — two things will likely occur in the realm of consumer banking:

One, as Americans, we will have restructured our personal financial balance sheets. Right now, as a society, we are drowning in debt following a 25-year period that saw the growth of total U.S. debt — private and public — outpace the growth of GDP by a factor of four to one.

Second, we will emerge into the dawn of a new financial era in which we change how we bank in some very fundamental ways. Much like how access to digital communications altered the way we filter and process news and information, the consumers' drive to adopt and adapt new technologies will transform the banking processes.

But back to the here and now. Most Americans are going to go through a painful process of rebalancing their personal and family balance sheets. The fact is that debt had become an outsized variable in the equation, and we will need to see a return to more of a savings culture.

In that regard, one of the focus areas that Bank of America and MIT are working jointly on through the Center for Future Banking focuses on how to reverse the troubling erosion of personal savings in America. In the final years leading into this crisis, the savings rate in America actually fell below zero into the negative. Americans were collectively spending more than we they earned, and that's just not sustainable.

We also are exploring the role of debt, and more specifically how to redefine credit models as we develop the next generation of lending products and services. What innovations can we make to credit cards so that they are more useful as a financial management tool? How can we change the way families think about household budgets, and provide banking tools to support them?

As John Hockenberry said in our conversation, banking is about relationships and meeting the needs of our customers. At the end of the day, that's one thing that won't change.

Jeff Carter is the chief executive-in-residence from Bank of America at the MIT Media Lab's Center for Future Banking.