How you'll pay your bills on Facebook
- Published on Monday, 07 February 2011 00:00
Users of social networking site Facebook, who today upload photos or share stories from their lives, may soon be able to pay their bills using an application on the site.
The power of Facebook is demonstrated by the astonishing statistic that if it was a country, the number of users would make it the third biggest nation in the world.
But would you want to pay your bills and do your banking on it? We explore how payments would work and whether it is safe.
How does it work?
A company called Striata has developed a PDF ebill that lets customers pay bills on their mobile, in an email and even on Facebook.
The bill is delivered to your email or Facebook inbox and once you've saved your payment details these can be used again for future payments.
If you do opt in, the details are stored with the payment provider and can only be used to pay a linked bill.
Is it safe?
According to Striata there is no registration needed by the customer. The consumer receives the email bill and authenticates it by the personal information displayed on the cover email. This is information that could never be known by a phisher, an internet fraudster trawling for your details. The email is also digitally signed.
The shared secret instruction is detailed on the cover – for example it may say: please enter your date of birth ddmmyyyy and the last 4 digits of your card.
The PDF itself is encrypted so it cannot be intercepted. The payment form does not require registration – all it requires is for the consumer to enter details and click to pay.
Payment is also secured by the SSL certificate on the payment server (the server that Striata connect to). In non-geek speak this means the data is transmitted in a secure way – exactly the same as an internet banking session.
When will it be available?
The system was launched earlier this week at Finovate, a conference where Striata demonstrated their product to banking and financial technology companies.
Striata has yet to announce if any company has decided to implement the Facebook or PDF billing feature, but if they do, paying your bills on Facebook could be a lot closer than you think.
Video: See how it works
This is Money journalist, Tara Evans spoke to Mia Papanicolaou, messaging specialist and Nicola Els, head of eBilling at Striata. Watch the video to see a demo of how Facebook payments would work.
"Our eDocument project has been a great success. Striata enabled us to go to market with a quality solution that is not only achieving our customer satisfaction goals, but is exceeding our goal to convert paper to electronic documents."