The emergence of the concept of ecosystem services has triggered considerable discussion about the appropriate tools and institutional arrangements to provide ecosystem services. These tools include among others biodiversity “banks” that have been developed to provide biodiversity units or credits to offset environmental damage caused by economic development. So far, little attention has been focused on the design of offset schemes and on the variety of their institutional forms. The purpose of this article is to analyse the development of biodiversity banking, to evaluate its implementation to date in the light of various institutional arrangements and to summarise the outstanding theoretical and practical problems. This article distinguishes and maps different biodiversity banking mechanisms based on different characteristics, in particular statement content, ecosystem services assessment and the nature of biodiversity banking. Our mapping exercise differentiates several main categories of biodiversity banks: private non-commercial, private commercial, hybrid commercial, public commercial and public non-commercial. This article presents concrete illustrations from existing biodiversity banking systems (US, Australia, France and Germany) and then analyses advantages and limits of each mechanism (and its concrete example).