It may not be enough to get people to drop their banks and race to U.S. Bank, but it could be a useful innovation. U.S. Bank just announced that they're the first bank in America to add, as their press release says, "Visa payWave technology to an unembossed debit card that is issued instantly to an account holder upon opening an account."

In English, this means that if you go to U.S. Bank and open an account, you won't have to do with a temporary debit card number while you wait for the real card to show up in the mail. They'll just give you a card after you sign up for an account, and you can use it immediately.

At the moment, they're just testing this at certain U.S. Bank branches in Denver and Salt Lake City, but if this goes well, obviously they'll roll out the technology to all of their branches across the country. And one can imagine that if U.S. Bank does that, someday in the future, all banks will.

Granted, it erases a minor annoyance in life, and I'd be a lot happier if banks would work on technology that makes it easier to keep track of your money and avoid overdraft fees, but I guess we take what we can get.

In any case, this is the second venture in a week that U.S. Bank has announced with Visa. They've just debuted a joint web site called Syncada, which is a retooled version of an older U.S. Bank product called PowerTrack. Syncada is, according to the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal, "a business-to-business network that allows companies and governments to process and track invoices, make and receive payments, and have payables or receivables financed."

One of the hallmarks of Syncada is that these invoices and payments can be sent from business to business around the globe. So entrepreneurs and small business owners, hoping to avoid even more annoyances with invoicing and getting paid, may want to check that out.