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YouCanPayMyBill.com and CentralBill.com
Fantastic new website that makes it easy for other people to pay your bills out of kindness. It's all connected to your suppliers (gas/electricity/internet/water/shelter), you can pay anybody's bills with one click. | |
The serious part of this idea is a central place (centralbill.com) where you can pay for any bill with one interface and it's trivial and easy and not a pain.
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This reminds me of a website in the UK twenty-something years ago where you could notify lots of different parties of a change of address. |
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It would have a similar requirement for integration with lots of different utility-providers. |
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[-] The “serious part of this idea” - a central handler to pay all your bills - is WKTE. I pay all of my recurring bills by automated direct debit from one of my bank accounts. There are also many apps and online services (Quicken, Prism, PayTrust, MyCheckFree, and others) to consolidate bill paying. |
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The other parts? That it has to be “trivial and not a pain” and someone else can pay your bills - but without saying how you’ll make it happen? Wouldn’t it be nice… |
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//how you’ll make it happen// |
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That seems obvious, the benefactor goes to the central place, enters the recipient's detains (name, address) and clicks "pay now". The system does a look-up to see if the recipient is registered with any of a number of aggregators and utility companies, and if they are, the system pays off all their debts and charges the benefactor's account. If not, the system charges the benefactor's account anyway by an estimated amount, and then sends a letter to the name and address with instructions on how to claim the amount (by registering with a partner aggregator presumably, so as to harvest recipients as new customers). The service will also be able to earn interest on the funds in the time between the benefactor's payment, and the recipient claiming the funds. Win win. |
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Now all you need to do is work out a marketing strategy to get buy-in from potential benefactors. |
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[pocmloc] - your first part seems non-trivial and painful. The benefactor would have to be extremely motivated and have a lot of information on the poor beggar. |
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The last bit - lining up potential benfactors - that's no problem at all. It will happen simply by wishing for it. |
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Right but that is how the site is developed and refined. They can use Generic Algorithms and Strong AI and stuff, so that if I go and in the form where it says "whose bills do you want to pay" I type in (as free text) "[a1] from the halfbakery" the system just takes my money and then tries to find you. |
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Could you throw in an API or two? I know Sam likes those. |
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