The EU introduced regulation to make bank accounts available to everybody - even those without a permanent address of residence [0]. The EU's members are currently passing the corresponding national laws (they have until 2016 to do so).
I have bank accounts with Visa debit cards and I pay 0 for them. It really shocks me to see that in some less civilised countries people need to pay to give their banks money to play with.
Well once not paying interest did actually pay for bank accounts, when interest rates were high. Now they are zero, banks switched to mis-selling profifitable financial services to pay for it. What they seem incapable of is actually making cheap bank accounts by significantly reducing costs. Generally you expect them to have some way to cover their costs, unless the government is going to provide bank accounts as a basic service.