Maybe American Express would pioneer this. It might attract customers. But they might want your fingerprint, to keep from getting scammed.

The idea is give you enough money to tide over the temporaryfinancial crises. You should get least 200 dollars as SOS Money,so that you have enough money to get into a motel and call yourfriends or relatives for further help. ATM's could also doleout the SOS money. The ATM's could have a SOS money button . Theperson could enter his secret code sans a ATM card and with draw theSOS money.

Assuming the money would be delivered by an ATM, and that there was cash in the user's bank account to cover it, and that the user had already authorized SOS withdrawals, this idea wouldn't be hard to implement, and would benefit the bank by attracting customers. It would be easy to test in a sample market for a year or two, so there'd be little risk. (I wonder if something like this doesn't already exist somewhere.)