New options to pay your bill: PayPal, Venmo

by Andrew Millard | Sept. 8, 2021

Recently I was involved in the rollout of Hawaiian Electric’s new third party payment platform, Paymentus. The updated service lowers transaction fees for customers — and it also adds Venmo and Paypal as new options to pay your electric bill. What I like about this upgrade is that more people will be able to use their preferred form of payment, just like my friends and family can with me.

Over the years I’ve noticed that people don’t carry cash as much as they use to. Virtual payment options simply have the advantage of being more convenient for everyone. Perhaps the pandemic has also played a role in incentivizing the adoption of virtual forms of payment. I’ve seen more and more ways for people to pay each other entering the market.

With new options, it can be an issue when my friends and family members use different services. For instance, my dad uses Paypal, my mom still prefers writing checks, my brother uses Zelle, a close friend uses Venmo and another friend only uses cash. I’ve tried to address this by enrolling in a variety of services so that I never run into the problem where we can’t pay each other back.

As a company, we want to be able to offer a variety of options for customers to pay their electric bill. The implementation of Paymentus is exciting since it allows us to do this. One of the new payment options is Venmo, which is notably a mobile-only service. Fortunately for me, I’ll be able to use either Venmo or PayPal since I’m signed up for both services.

Along with virtual payments, mobile phones are becoming an increasingly larger part of people’s daily lives. Personally, this affects my job as a web developer because I need to help ensure our website works well on mobile devices. This will make interacting with Hawaiian Electric’s website more convenient. Technology continues to improve and in turn affects how we operate. What was once done using paper and pen can now be done with the mobile phone in your pocket.

If you prefer to pay your electric bill with Venmo or PayPal, now you can easily do so with our new third party vendor, Paymentus. In the future, maybe we’ll be able to integrate Google Voice and Alexa. I look forward to playing a role as we continue to incorporate new services for customers.

Andrew Millard is a digital communications analyst at Hawaiian Electric.