Paying bills by bank machine

Back in February I wrote a post on how easy it is to transfer money to another person's bank account. It turns out it's also really convenient to pay bills at specialized bank machines.

There seem to actually be an enormous number of ways to pay a bill. Here is the latest electric bill for the studio apartment that Erma and I rent as an office.

Two things to note. On the middle right, there is a red box within which are account numbers at all the major banks in Korea. You can transfer money to any one of these accounts to pay your bill. Presumably this is something you would arrange in person at a bank or on line. The account transfer method by ATM shown in my earlier post wouldn't work, because there is no way to provide the billing account number.

The bottom third of the bill is the detachable section that you would send in if paying your bill by mail. It also has a 2D scannable code on the lower right.

It's that 2D code that is read by the specialized ATM machines used for paying bills.

Here's the opening screen of the ATM. (It looks weird because I've stitched together two separate photographs.)

We were initially baffled by this screen. None of the options seemed to obviously fit our bill. Several of them are for paying local taxes. One, on the upper right, if for "apartment management fees".

The first time Erma and I wanted to pay a bill this way, the bank assistant came out and helped us do it. But we failed to pay attention to which button she selected. The next time we tried to pay, we just couldn't figure it out. So we took some pictures and brought them home to check against a dictionary and ask Erma's parents.

The button at the upper left says "jiro 지로". My on-line Korean-English dictionary translates as "electronic billing system, (Brit) giro". Turns out that according to this Wikipedia entry, giro is an electronic payment system primarily used in Europe, and the name derives from the Italian giro 'circulation of money'.

Anyway, it turns out that that button—"giro utility bill payment"—is the right one. Check out the video below to see how the payment process works. (Better yet, click through to the higher quality version on Vimeo.)

To view higher-quality video on Vimeo, click me and enter password "korea".