Residents of the land down under can now pay their bills with cryptocurrency. While many companies are still reluctant to jump on the crypto bandwagon, a partnership between two firms provides a platform that allows Australians to pay almost all of their bills with crypto, regardless of whether or not the payee accepts digital currency.
The cryptocurrency exchange Cointree has joined forced with automated billing platform Gobbill to launch the platform. Gobbill now acts as an intermediary, accepting cryptocurrency from users and paying bills on their behalf.
Gobbill CEO Shendon Ewans, who co-founded the company with Quentin Marsh, wasn’t an early adopter of cryptocurrencies. He only got in on the action last year, but admits that his late arrival was a catalyst for wanting to partner with Cointree. He explained, “I have traded, but not very successfully. That was the appeal of Cointree. I’m a novice and I’m surrounded by people at [FinTech co-working space] Stone and Chalk, who are deep crypto specialists. Fast forward into the future and what we’re seeing is, like it or not, this will be part of our daily lives. Gobbill already let people pay bills from their cards or bank accounts, so now they can pay in cryptocurrency too.”
Gobbill is licensed as a financial services company in Australia through the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). For its part, Cointree is licensed in the country through the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) in order to meet the agency’s guidelines covering anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing requirements.
Ewans acknowledges that Gobbill is still not producing revenue, but recent changes at the company will help move it into the black. The three-year-old company has begun charging fees to small businesses in order to digitize their invoices. He stated, “We’ve grown to a point where we’re now capital raising … for the first two years it was just my co-founder and I and it was a lot of research and development and testing. We only launched in the last year and we have a small number of users, but the partnership with Cointree and with our other with MyProsperity we’ll see more growth.”
Cointree was founded in 2013. It has around 60,000 active members and has reportedly managed 100 million cryptocurrency transactions. The company has offered a bill-paying service previously, but expects the recent partnership to open up crypto-based payments to others who haven’t been actively been involved in the digital currency space.
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