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BitPay Inc. expanded the payment capabilities of its cryptocurrency wallet Tuesday with inclusion of bill payment. BitPay users can now pay bills with digital currency at more than 5,000 billers, the Atlanta-based company says.
To enable bill payment, BitPay has partnered with Method Financial, an Austin, Texas-based provider of embedded banking services. Method Financial is serving as the bill-payment aggregator.
To enable bill payment through its wallet, BitPay is using customer-provided information to search for any bill available for payment, such as monthly bills reported to credit bureaus and used to help determine a consumer’s credit score. Examples of such bills include credit card statements, mortgages, and car loans.
To pay bills, BitPay users verify their identity using BitPay ID. Next, they tap the Connect Bills tab. After clicking on the tab, Method Financial searches for and presents available bills. Users then select the bills they want to pay. The more than 5,000 billers available to BitPay users are part of Method Financial’s network of more than 10,000 merchants.
“Having launched the first crypto-powered debit card years ago for our users, we wanted to expand our offerings to enable app users to buy, swap, spend, and now pay bills,” Bill Zielke, BitPay’s chief revenue and chief marketing officer, tells Digital Transactions News by email. “Bill Pay is a natural … extension of our product set aimed at users who transact and live life using crypto.”
BitPay supports paying bills with cryptocurrencies such ERC-20 tokens and stablecoins, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, and Litecoin. Other cryptocurrencies supported by the BitPay wallet include Shiba Inu, ApeCoin, Polygon, Dai, USD Coin, Binance USD, Wrapped Bitcoin, Pax Dollar, Gemini Dollar, and Euro Coin.
BitPay Bill Pay is available in Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Washington state.
“Paying everyday bills without a bank account is a monumental step for the crypto and unbanked community,” says BitPay chief executive Stephen Pair, in a statement. “BitPay customers are some of the most prominent crypto spenders in the world, so we believe this will be a game-changing solution for both crypto users and service providers.”
