Australian Bitcoin payment company Living Room of Satoshi announced that its new “Pay Anyone” service allows Australians to pay bitcoin directly to any bank account.
“Bitcoin users can now pay their friends, tradesmen and anyone else; even if the recipient has no knowledge about bitcoin,” says Living Room of Satoshi CEO Daniel Alexiuc. “This is a vital piece of payment infrastructure that is now available to all Australians.”
Living Room of Satoshi is a payments company that enables payment of any bill that uses the BPAY system using bitcoin. Customers can spend bitcoin to pay phone bills, electricity bills, school fees, credit cards, tax payments and more. Founded in 2014, the company has processed more than $500,000 of Australian bills using bitcoin.
BPAY is an electronic bill payment system in Australia which enables payments to be made through a financial institution's online, mobile or telephone banking facility to organizations which are registered BPAY billers. BPAY is a registered trading name of BPAY Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cardlink Services Limited. Cardlink is owned equally by the four major Australian banks: Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank Limited and Westpac Banking Corporation.
“Today BPAY offers fast, secure and convenient bill payments through over 150 Australian financial institutions, such as banks and credit unions, covering over 95 percent of the consumer banking market,” states the BPAY website. “That means most Australians can now enjoy the convenience of paying their bills with BPAY. And with BPAY offered on over 44,000 bills (via 22,000 billers and more than 22,000 Sub Billers), these businesses cover a spectrum of industries with over 354 industry (ANZSIC) codes represented in the BPAY biller file. We now accept more payments than ever. In fact, each month we help process more than 30 million bills worth more than $24 billion – with around 92 percent of these paid through a customer’s online or mobile bank.”
“All of our customers find Bitcoin a fast, secure and convenient way to pay bills,” said Alexiuc in a recent interview published on the Australian edition of CIO Magazine. “You can see from our graphs page that our customers are paying all sorts of everyday bills, from toll road charges to tax bills. Many use Living Room of Satoshi to pay off their credit cards with Bitcoin, which opens up an even greater range of places to spend bitcoin.”
He added that, in Australia, by far the biggest impediment to the adoption of Bitcoin is the recent GST (Goods and Service Tax) ruling. According to Alexiuc, Bitcoin is a nascent and unprecedented technology that regulators are still struggling to comprehend, and therefore the software developers in Australia need to continue to innovate and demonstrate the utility of bitcoin, which will in turn shape regulation. It needs to be easy for businesses to transact completely in bitcoin – to sell products in bitcoin, pay their staff in bitcoin and purchase supplies in bitcoin.