Google Pony Express will let you pay bills in Gmail
Soon, you might be able to pay your monthly bills without ever leaving your email account.
Google is working on a bill payment system, called Pony Express, that would save you from having to visit a utility or service鈥檚 website, let alone make the treacherous trek all the way to your physical mailbox.
Details of the service are laid out in a 鈥渓engthy document鈥� reviewed聽.
The service is set to roll out late this year, according to the document. It wasn鈥檛 clear whether Pony Express is a code name being used during development or would be the product鈥檚 official name, Re/code reported.
Google declined to comment for the blog鈥檚 post.
According to the document, users would provide information like name, address, telephone and at least partial Social Security numbers.
Online billing is, obviously, not a new service. But Google would presumably tout its ability to pull all of a user鈥檚 bills together into one convenient folder and set up a single, simple method for paying them.
Screenshots published by Re/code show such a folder, as well as a feature that allows users聽to click on a bill and indicate聽whether they鈥檇 like to use a preapproved bank account to pay it.
The document also showed the ability to share a bill with other Gmail users 鈥斅爏ay, a spouse or roommate 鈥斅燼nd a way to capture an image of the bill, which could be used for actions like filing expense reports.
A handful of existing apps let users pull all their bills together and pay them in one place. But Google鈥檚 obvious advantage is the more than half a billion people who already regularly use Gmail.
Mobile and online payments have become an area of high interest for Google in recent months.聽The technology giant is reportedly working on聽, a mobile payments system that would expand upon its existing Google Wallet service and compete with the rapidly emerging聽.
Android Pay, which is expected to debut in May, would let companies add a tap-to-pay option at their retail locations or a button on their apps that would let users pay for merchandise with a single touch.
Doug Gross is a staff writer covering personal finance for聽. Follow him on Twitter聽and on聽.
