Google Will Allow You To Pay Bills Through Gmail With Pony Express

Re/code are reporting about new project from Google titled ‘Pony Express’. Here is how the service will work, a Gmail user provides their personal information (name, address, partial and full social security number) and then a third party (identi.co) uses this information to confirm that individuals identity. Additional information may be required (e.g credit card number or telephone number).

The main idea behind Pony Express seems to be to make bill paying more organized, e.g all bills can be categorized into a special Pony Express folder which shows all of your upcoming bills in one place. Users will also be able to easily split bills with other Gmail users (which is particularly useful for those living in shared houses).

• Scheduled to start in the fourth quarter of 2015
• It’s unclear if Pony Express is the actual name they will use, or if that’s just an internal name currently being used (my guess is the later, but you never know with tech companies)
• It’s unclear if Google will try to earn any revenue from this project, or if it will solely be used as a means of acquiring data about it’s customers. This data is extremely valuable (e.g if I know your insurance premium is due in March I can advertise to you heavily in February when you’re most likely to make the switch), but it will of course draw a lot of privacy concerns. This would also allow Google to better identify their users with a real person.

Payment Methods

We obviously only have very limited information about this project at the moment, but in the screenshots that re/code received it appears that it’s possible to pay with a linked bank account or debit card. Users can also pay an additional fee to have those payments expedited (which is the same business model that Evolve Money uses). It’s not clear if credit card payments will be able to be made and if they are if any additional fees will be charged.

Final Thoughts

The Bill Payment space is getting incredibly crowded, Check (now called Mint Bills) was bought by Inuit for $360 million (a nice ~7x return for investors) there is also Evolve Money and a host of other smaller players/start ups. It’d be nice to have a central dashboard for paying all of my bills, but if there is no credit card support I doubt I’d use a service such as this.