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".

Speaking of ATMs

One thing I like about my bank account is that I have a passbook. I remember having one of these when, as little kid, I opened my first savings account at our neighborhood bank. But I think they have long disappeared from American banking.

The ATM machines at my bank have a slot for the passbook. The machine automatically updates it with a record of all transactions since the last time it was updated.

If there are a lot of records to update, and they don't all fit on the current page, the ATM will eject the passbook when the page is full, then ask you to turn the page and reinsert it.

Bank transfers

As pointed out earlier, Korea is a small country. There are many advantages to living in a small country. One is the ease of transferring money to other people's bank accounts. You can send money to anybody, at any time, using your bank's ATM.

There are few enough banks that nearly all of them fit easily on one screen.

Once you've selected the bank, you enter the recipient's account number.

Then the amount:

A confirmation screen shows you the name of the account holder, so you can be sure you are sending the money to the right account.

(Account number and account holder name deliberately blurred.)

The service charge is trivial: less than fifty cents.

This method of sending money around is so convenient that it's the default method for making payments for most bills. It's how I pay my rent to Herren Haus. What I was doing when I took the above photos was paying the bimonthly milk bill (about US $20) to the boy's daycare.