This past month, the term “March Madness” could just as easily have described the frenzy of activity within the financial services industry as it does the annual NCAA college basketball tournament. New investment ideas, online resources and marketing efforts highlighted an especially busy March.

Fidelity implemented a new, full-scale marketing campaign this month called the Guide to Personal Savings (GPS) Program. Introduced on the public homepage, this new campaign offers investors a number of different guidance services for all life stages. A new public sitelet, a series of nationwide investment seminars, a new “Turn Here” slogan and online webinars and tutorials highlight some of the campaign offerings. Keeping with the theme of personal savings, Charles Schwab added a new Savings Fundamentals section to its public site, providing explanations for various approaches to personal savings. Vanguard also introduced a new blog that offers insights from high-ranking firm professionals about the economy, investing and retirement.

A number of new budgetary and suitability tools were released this month. A unique addition was ING’s savings comparison tool, which allows users to compare their retirement readiness to other people of a similar age that also live in the same area. By recognizing that retirement needs are different for people around the country, ING’s tool theoretically provides a more complete picture of the user’s retirement preparedness. Nationwide and OppenheimerFunds introduced new suitability tools to their advisor sites. The R-Retirement Analyzer offered by Nationwide provides a look at a client’s future income needs, while OppenheimerFunds’ Understanding Your Clients tool provides investment strategies in response to a client’s common behavioral tendencies.

With widening spreads and increasing yields on many corporate and municipal issues, firms are increasingly promoting fixed income investing on their sites. Zecco added fixed income trading capabilities to its private site. E*Trade Financial redesigned its private site Bond Resource Center and added a new fixed income selector tool. Both American Century and American Funds added public site commentary suggesting fixed income investing.

In the credit card industry, Capital One and Citibank both released new cards targeted towards younger users. Capital One introduced the MTV Visa credit card, which offers a number of MTV rewards, such as brand merchandise or tickets to network shows. Citibank released a Forward Visa card, co-branded with MySpace, which includes many MySpace-related rewards.

As a response to the federal government’s Making Home Affordable program, Bank of America, Chase, Fifth Third, U.S. Bank, Wachovia, WaMu and Wells Fargo all announced support for the program on their public sites.