Established and institutional businesses, service providers and insurers might not have chosen cryptocurrencies for their operations, but Australia will soon be able to transact in them. Two native fintech start-ups have partnered to allow cryptocurrency users to pay bills in crypto.

Australians can now pay bills with cryptocurrency, thanks to automated billing platform Gobbill and cryptocurrency exchange Cointree. Gobbill will function as an agent by accepting the funds from its customers and paying bills on their behalf. The co-founder of Gobbill, Shendon Ewans states that he has entered late into the cryptocurrency space to only participate in it last year, but that’s what makes collaboration with Cointree fascinating.  

“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,” shared Ewans.  “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,” he further added.

As for the regulatory approvals, Cointree holds a license under AUSTRAC to fulfil anti-money laundering (AML) and counter terrorist financing (CFT) norms. At the same time, Gobbill is licensed under ASIC for Australian financial services. Even though Gobbill is in the pre-revenue stage, it has recently started to charge a fee from small businesses in return of digitising their invoices, said Evans.

Gobbill has now reached the stage of capital funding in its third year of operation, while for the first two years, Evans and his co-founder were involved in extensive research, 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,” he further added.

Launched in 2013, Cointree operates with the vision of making purchase and sale of Bitcoin easier for the public. With over 60,000 active users currently, it has processed a hundred million transactions. The exchange now supports forty cryptocurrencies, including Litecoin, Ripple and NEO, apart from Ether and Bitcoin.

Cointree has had a facility through which customers paid bills, shared Jess Rendon, operations manager at Cointree. She believes that this collaboration will make it a simpler process and open it up globally to people who have not transacted in cryptocurrencies before. “Last year alone we had about $100 million of bills paid and saw ten times growth in this payment feature,” she further added.

Recently, the business rebranded and relaunched the exchange with the motive of going international. The initial step in this process is token-to-token trading in global markets, which continues to be less regulated than token-to-fiat trading. For this, Cointree hopes to get permissions from international regulators.

Karen Peralta has an extensive background in Training. She is a Communication and Process Trainer by profession, consistently awarded by the companies she had supported: Sutherland, Alorica and Concentrix. She started as a freelance writer for Coinedict and climbed her way to becoming Consultant Content Manager due to her strong enthusiasm in blockchain.

Karen Peralta has an extensive background in Training. She is a Communication and Process Trainer by profession, consistently awarded by the companies she had supported: Sutherland, Alorica and Concentrix. She started as a freelance writer for Coinedict and climbed her way to becoming Consultant Content Manager due to her strong enthusiasm in blockchain.