You want to wire money to someone in another state. Just go to the website and type in your banks routing information and your account number, the same information that's on a written check. And provide the routing numbers and name of the bank and the name of the account in which to deposit the money. Fill out the form and hit return. It's like an electronic check, the same information is exchanged between the two parties involved when ever a physical check is drafted. There would be a great potential for fraud that would have to be delt with.

Matt Benjamin
-- ecolonsmak, Sep 29 1999

PayPal http://www.paypal.com/
This Web site offers a service very similar to Matt's idea. Users identify each other by their e-mail addresses. User accounts can be linked to bank accounts or credit cards at the user's option. Safeguards are in place to prevent fraud. (For example, users' street addresses are verified directly via postal mail.) [l2g, Sep 29 1999, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Eek! Not in MY account. It's bad enough that all that stuff is on a check to begin with in a form that anyone can read. There have been scams perpetrated (http://www.snopes.com/spoons/faxlore/cartel.htm) through this.
-- StarChaser, Oct 24 1999


Editorial suggestion: To create an annotation that's mostly a link, click on the [link] to the lower left of the text.

Annotations don't auto-mark-up URLs, and tend to squish the center column if they contain long unbreakable words.
-- jutta, Oct 26 1999


I don't have anything specific to add to this, but feel that every so often, the least interesting idea needs picking up off the bottom of the stack, so it can briefly examined and remembered by the bakery regulars and then discarded to sink back down through the pile again. Micro-cells should be the next to get this treatment.
-- Lemon, Dec 20 2000


[Lemon] I quite agree. It's interesting to reflect on the idea that, not so long ago, paying for goods and services over the internet was a distant fantasy.
-- hippo, Aug 21 2012


Not so long ago, the internet was a distant fantasy too …
-- 8th of 7, Aug 21 2012


Lets not pretend that this was original thought.

"BACS was invented by Dennis Gladwell and was started in 1968 as the Inter-Bank Computer Bureau, set up to develop electronic transfer of funds between banks and avoid the need for paper documents as part of the money transfer process."
-- PainOCommonSense, Aug 21 2012



random, halfbakery