I ended up paying somebody else’s electricity bill by mistake, and therein lies a tale.
About three weeks ago or so, an alert popped up on my phone. It was a notification from the Cred app. Or it may be that I saw this notification while doing something else on the Cred app. But whether it was a notification on my phone or within the Cred app, the call to action was clear. Two days left to pay your electricity bill, it said, inviting me to go ahead and pay.
Now, I usually pay the electricity bill by using either Amazon Pay or Google Pay, but I had no aversion to paying it via the Cred app. I already pay my credit card bills using the app, so why not electricity bills too? The amount that I had to pay looked right (based on what I remembered from the bill that the utility had sent me), and so I went ahead and paid.
And that was that, I thought.
Except we received, some days ago, the next month’s bill. And this latest bill said that we had to pay a whopper of an amount. Upon going through the fine print, we realized it was a whopper because I had not paid last months’ bill.
Except, of course, I had!
And so I dug through Cred’s sections, hunting down the notification re: I having paid the bill. And sure enough, there it was… except, on closer perusal, for one crucial fact. The consumer number wasn’t correct.
So what had happened?
I still get notifications in my inbox for electricity bills from the last apartment I used to stay in. We shifted out of that place in 2016, but I continue to get electricity bills for that apartment. And Cred, for some reason, decided for me that this was an electricity bill I needed to pay. And told me to pay it. And I went ahead and paid for it.
What is Cred? It is a start-up through which you can pay your credit card bills. There is a lot more going on there, but that is (maybe) a story for another blogpost. For now, it is an app that helps you pay your credit card bills, and that is good enough for us.
How do you go about adding your credit cards on the app? Well, you enter the number, you enter an OTP that you get on your phone, you jump through a couple of other hoops, and then you’re set. You get bill alerts, payment due day alerts, and there’s some gamification after you’ve made payment via the Cred app.
But the most important thing is that you have to opt-in when it comes to adding your credit card. It is not added in by default, you have to choose to add your credit card.
But the electricity bill? Ah, that was opt-out. I wasn’t asked to confirm if this was my bill. I’m sure I must have pressed yes at some point of time to a question along the lines of “Can we trawl through your inbox to identify bills you need to pay”, and I’m well aware of the fact that I was a lazy chump to do so. This blogpost is not me complaining about Cred, or saying something illegal happened.
But it certainly is about choice architecture. Having trawled through my inbox, and having surfaced an electricity bill, I sure do wish that Cred had added an additional verification step. If the name on the bill doesn’t match my name on Cred, maybe ask if this bill is mine? Or even if it does, still check if I should be paying this bill (maybe I’ve rented out that flat, and my tenant should be paying it, for example?).
And only post this confirmation should you be sending me a message to pay “my” electricity bill?
This is, of course, a well known problem in behavioral economics. See here, for example. Or open up the Zomato app! Just before you make payment, take a look at the fact that you’re paying INR 4 to the Feeding India Foundation – this is opt-out. That is, Zomato assumes you are willing to pay the 4 rupees, and you have to opt-out of paying it.
And Zomato will not send you cutlery by default – you have to opt-in to have the cutlery be sent to you.
And I do wish that electricity bill payments on Cred were opt-in, not opt-out!
P.S. This is a true story, but is also a useful way to segue into announcing that GIPE is hosting a week-long seminar on behavioral economics. I will be taking a couple of these sessions, and I now have skin in the game when it comes to talking about choice architecture. An ironical thank you is due to Cred, I suppose.
P.P.S I’m in touch with Cred about this, and while I am not asking for a refund, I do hope that they change their choice architecture. I’ll keep you guys updated 🙂
EconForEverybody 