I found this new beta (hat tip to Chris) fascinating, and a clearer example of how microformats work to the layman. 

Its the first effort that starts to play out the vision that I see for microformats and Banking.  Operator is a firefox extension that “watches” for information that it understands. 

The simple example provided here is for areas where standards exist, such as dates, addresses, and photographs.

Operator requires information on the Web to be encoded using microformats, and since this method for semantically encoding information is relatively new, not all sites are using microformats yet.  ….

As more sites begin to semantically encode data with microformats, Operator will automatically work with them as well.

Source: Mozilla Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing Operator

However the part that interests be is the “as more sites” statement.  The earlier reference was to microformats as information brokers.  In the above example microformats are information brokers for interesting address, dates, and photo’s.

What about banking services that I require, better interest rates, bill updates etc.  Its becoming clear that microformats will be focussed on the above items in the near term, but I predict someone will establish a way to use for items beyond the narrow scope of dates and addresses.