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For Bank of America's eBills feature, you can select a "pay-from" account that is from another bank.
However, they require it to be a checking or a money-market account, not a savings account:

Screenshot

I was wondering, why might this be?
What relevant feature here does a money-market account have that e.g. a savings account doesn't?

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Most banks will not allow you to use online bill pay with a savings account as the funding source; rather, instead it must be funded from either a checking or money market account. The reason for this is that checks can typically be written from a money market account but not from a savings account.

Update: I was having trouble wrapping my head around what the check would look like when the "pay from account" is an external bank, so I just called Bank of America and asked them. Basically, they do an ACH Withdrawal from your external bank account and route the money directly to the payee electronically. This means that your BofA account isn't touched and it won't show up on your BofA statement (but you can see it in the online bill pay history, and on your external bank's statement.) If the payee cannot be paid electronically, than you cannot use an external funding source. In other words, if a physical check is going to be sent, then it must have a BofA account as its funding source.

Even though the ACH withdrawal should technically be allowed from a savings account, I suspect that this is forbidden since the intended purpose of the ACH is actually to streamline the writing of a check.

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  • I don't think they're doing any kind of ACH withdrawal? I haven't tried it though, but it'd be pretty weird since they haven't put a mention of such a thing anywhere. I'm also confused why you say my situation seems to be backwards, since it seems to be the exact same as what you just described...?
    – user541686
    Dec 5, 2016 at 5:47
  • @Mehrdad - I called BofA to find out how the pay from account works with external banks, and updated my answer.
    – TTT
    Dec 5, 2016 at 18:52
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    @Mehrdad - good question. I'm not sure what description will show up on your statement. I think the ACH initiating bank (BofA) gets to put whatever they want there. I hope they wouldn't just say "BofA online bill pay" or similar because it would be a tad annoying to have to then log into BofA to see what it was. I hope it would have the payee listed.
    – TTT
    Dec 5, 2016 at 20:04
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    @Mehrdad - Great. Definitely let us know!
    – TTT
    Dec 6, 2016 at 3:04
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    Forgot to update. So when I tried to pay a credit card using this method it indeed went through and appeared as [Credit Card Company] ONLINE PMT CKF[Number]POS WEB ID: [Number] on my pay-from account. No trace of Bank of America as far as I can see.
    – user541686
    Dec 16, 2016 at 11:06

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