BillMonk - keep track of debts on a website... why not just pay them?

There’s a new service available that lets you keep track of how much you owe to who.

I don’t get it. I need to go to a website to keep track of what I owe to who and who owes me? Why not, like, just pay the damn thing right away?

It is not considerably higher effort to go to an Internet bank to make the actual payment to a friend, than it is to go to BillMonk to register it to pay at a later time. So here’s a speculation: BillMonk is only going to take off in communities where access to e- and m-banking channels is sub-optimal. (that’s a nice word for “sucks”)

BillMonk says you can also keep track of costs with a mobile. To counter that — some banks in Estonia are offering mobile payments which are a really really REALLY convenient way of paying between people. Somehow, they have not taken off though, my guess is people still need to get used to the idea of their handset being a payment terminal. Once you get it though (and you have other people to actually pay to who have a similar agreement), it’s a no-brainer to make a mobile payment — as the user flow there is really optimal, my guess is it’s even a smaller effort than BillMonk’s notification.

One bad thing about the mobile payments and other similar value-added services like mobile parking is they only work locally. So you have to get adapted to local models and providers. The moment someone makes this stuff work across boundaries and providers, say, in the whole Euro area, that person is gong to make quite a few bucks.

There’s an additional cost of trust when switching your behaviour over to such services. Who guarantees me they won’t do anything nasty with the data? Can I believe they will still be around in a year (or else, I have shifted all my info over to the service, and am suddenly cut off and left stranded)? With my bank, I have at least some sort of trust relationship going on.

So that leaves us with BillMonk’s value-added services outside payment tracking (which as I suggest can be replaced with “just paying”) — the various models of gifts, “victim”, clubs etc. I guess that’s where the real value and convenience is — if they can make it compelling enough.