Australian Fintech Startups to Let Locals Pay Bills with Crypto

Published on 21 August 2018 by Cryptovest Staff

Australians will be able to settle their bills with digital currencies thanks to a partnership between crypto marketplace Cointree and billing platform Gobbill.

Australia-based automated billing service Gobbill has joined hands with digital asset exchange Cointree to enable the payment of household bills through cryptocurrencies, Gobbill announced in a statement on Monday.

The new feature, which targets households and small businesses, lets users of the crypto exchange utilize the tokens they have stored in their wallets to pay bills. At the same time, those with Gobbill accounts can add a link to a Cointree crypto wallet and thus choose to settle their bills either via credit card, bank transfer or cryptocurrency.

Gobbill will act as an intermediary transferring the funds from the user accounts to, for example, utility companies and telecoms, so it will play no role whether the biller accepts virtual coins as a method of payment.

Although Cointree currently covers 27 cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, XRP, EO and TRX, Australians can only settle their bills with BTC for the time being, according to the exchange:

"We've been getting a lot of questions around our bill payments feature after our partnership announcement with @gobbill. You can currently pay bills using Bitcoin on our old platform https://t.co/oMVRWabnsK. The bill payment feature on the new platform is not released yet! ✨— Cointree (@CointreeAus) August 21, 2018"

In another Twitter thread, Cointree disclosed that DigiByte (DGB) is among the next ten coins to be added as payment options “shortly”.

"Digital currencies are becoming mainstream, and our view at Gobbill is to support customer choice and convenience. We anticipate a surge in the number of customers who would like to pay their bills in crypto in the coming years,” Gobbill CEO and co-founder Shendon Ewans said and added that when paying their bills with virtual coins, users will be protected from fraudulent activities."

Cointree is already running a bill payment service of its own, but hopes the collaborative effort with Gobbill will make the process easier and more accessible, the Australian publication Financial Review wrote on Monday citing operations manager Jessica Renden.

So far, neither of the companies has announced an expected launch date for the new payments service.