PayPal’s New Pal Is its First Payments Bot
PayPal has a new pal—namely its first bot that lets users move and manage their money in a conversational and casual style. Built on the Slack messaging platform, which has 5 million daily active users and enables teams to centralize conversations, people can use the bot to send money between PayPal accounts without leaving their Slack conversations, reports Paybefore’s sister publication Banking Technology.
Meron Colbeci, senior director, core consumer products, PayPal, says sending money from an account “is as easy as typing, ‘/PayPal send $5 to @Dave.’”
The bot is available to Slack users in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.
The firm says person-to-person payments (P2P) is “one of the most used features” on PayPal. In 2015 alone, it says its PayPal Holdings processed $41 billion in P2P volume across PayPal, Venmo and Xoom—a 42 percent increase in P2P TPV (total payment volume) year-on-year.
Colbeci goes on to say that P2P payment solutions like the PayPal bot, voice-activated payments through its recent Siri integration and in email via Microsoft’s Outlook.com are examples of how PayPal is “continually contextualizing how you move your money.”
The company also cites research from Gartner that says by the year 2020, the average person will interact more with bots than with his or her partner.
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