I believe I may be able to just use steem -> btc sent directly to bitpay to make that more streamlined using something like blocktrades.
Yeah, that's exactly how it works. You send the STEEM/SBD to Blocktrades, Blocktrades converts it to BTC, and then they send the BTC to your Bitpay card's address. Once you sign the transfer in your Steem wallet, it takes a few seconds for Bitpay to receive it...unless it's underpaid - then it takes up to 6 BTC confirmations, which is about 3.7 years, currently.
I must have been lucky; no problems with trading Steem for ETH on Polo and sending that to Kraken to trade for Euros that go to bank account.
Using BTC for fund transfers is so 2017. Oh wait ...
Yeah I just sent $61.50 worth of SBD to my bitpay card using blocktrades and it worked fine. Not sure what the fee was. It is not very clear about that.
That's exactly what I'm doing!