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AT&T Communications said on Thursday that starting now it will accept bill payment in cryptocurrency, making it the first mobile carrier, and one of the largest companies overall, to do so.
The company, a unit of AT&T Inc., is using Atlanta-based processor BitPay Inc. to handle digital-currency payments. No information was immediately available from the telecom company regarding how many such transactions AT&T expects to receive.as a proportion of its ordinary flow of payments.
BitPay processes Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, and says it plans to support so-called stablecoins, which are digital currencies tied to the U.S. dollar. Bitcoin is by far the most well-known and widely used of these choices, with a market capitalization of $138.7 billion and nearly 377,000 daily blockchain transactions as of late afternoon Thursday, according to Bitinforcharts.com. BitPay settles transactions to merchant clients in dollars.
To pay with digital currency, AT&T Communications customers choose BitPay as a payment option when they log into their accounts online or through the myAT&T app. AT&T Communications houses a number of key company units, including AT&T Mobility, DirecTV, U-Verse, and Cricket Wireless.
BitPay chief commercial officer Sonny Singh tells Digital Transactions News that AT&T first approached BitPay a year ago, and then said six months ago it was ready to begin accepting crypto. “They had customers asking for Bitcoin,” he says. The company is BitPay’s second-largest client after Microsoft Corp.
“We’re always looking for ways to improve and expand our services,” said Kevin McDorman, vice president for finance business operations at Dallas-based AT&T Communications, in a statement. “We have customers who use cryptocurrency, and we are happy we can offer them a way to pay their bills with the method they prefer.”
Singh says that, counterintuitively, larger companies are grasping the utility of cryptocurrency sooner than mid-size and smaller ones. “It’s cheaper than a credit card, so they make money on these transactions, and there’s no risk,” he says. BitPay’s standard fee is 1% of the transaction amount. Smaller companies, he says, are held back by the notion that they must hold Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, which are notoriously volatile. “They haven’t done the homework the big companies have,” Singh says.
