I am studying the market for bill pay services to determine if there is room for a service that uses direct deposit to pay bills or transfer funds between accounts for about the same price and in about the same number of banking days as writing and mailing a check.
Once one has the capability of transfering money between accounts, there are several interesting things that can be done. For instance if you have a reloadable Mastercard or Visa card and know the underlying bank account info, you can use such a service to load the card and then use the card to obtain local currency from an ATM anywhere in the world. Possible a good application for immigrants who send money to the folks back home.
Such a service could be accessed thru Quicken with a little cooperation from its makers. Or it could be accessed directly on the web.
Anyway, the short survey is at