It is true that many more banks (and some credit unions, too, no doubt) will add monthly fees to their checking accounts, especially now that bigger institutions like Chase and Bank of America have given them cover.

But they won’t all do so. In fact, ING Direct, the online banking colossus, wasted no time last week in sending out gleeful notes reminding the world that it has always offered free checking in an interest-bearing account and will continue to do so.

Finally, Chase worries about those who will abandon its checking accounts in the wake of its price increase. And by fretting that those people will end up “unbanked,” it invokes the bogeyman  the rapacious check casher standing behind bulletproof glass in a grimy strip mall somewhere hard by the liquor store.

I sincerely doubt, however, that many former bank customers, having tasted the good life with a debit card and nice people on the phone who can help when the card isn’t working, will turn to check-cashing enterprises if they get fed up with monthly bank fees.

In fact, there is an entire niche of the card industry that has quietly grown up to serve them in recent years. Known variously as “prepaid” or “reloadable” cards, this is plastic that has a Visa or MasterCard logo and works a lot like a debit card. You can use it in a store or to buy something on Amazon.com or to reserve a rental car.

The difference is you don’t get the card at a bank. Instead, a company like Green Dot offers it online and sells it on a rack in various stores next to the gift card displays. In fact, Green Dot has about 3.3 million active accounts, many of which it has issued with Wal-Mart under the “Walmart MoneyCard” brand. Cardholders in the Green Dot system had loaded about $10 billion onto the cards as of Sept. 30, 2010.