Everyone seems to be getting caught up in the bot fever. They are quiet, unobtrusive, and can come up with the information you require in a flash. Now, PayPal is launching a brand new bot that is aimed towards facilitating payments. And it has chosen the Slack platform to debut the service.
Announcing the move, the company said:
We’re focused on offering our customers a variety of innovative, easy and secure ways to move and manage their money.With this in mind, we built on the Slack platform to launch PayPal’s very first bot.
Using the service requires you to install the payment service’s bot that is available on the Slack App Directory. Once you have installed the bot using the directory, simply link your accounts and set your preferred transaction settings. The bot also gives you the option to chose when you want to review and approve transactions.
The feature appears to be aimed at making payments as ubiquitous as conversations. So, while being involved in conversations over slack, you can send money from your PayPal account to a friend by doing nothing more than typing:
/PayPal send $5 to @Dave.
Assuming that both you and Dave have your PayPal accounts linked with your respective Slack profiles, the money would be transferred instantaneously. The feature would also allow the company to double down upon peer-to-peer transfers, a niche which already makes up a significant volume of the company’s total transfers.
Today, person-to-person payments (P2P) is one of the most used features on PayPal. In 2015 alone, PayPal Holdings processed $41B in P2P volume across PayPal, Venmo and Xoom – a 42% increase in P2P TPV YoY.
PayPal has been doubling down upon expansion and improvement of its payment capabilities. Towards the end, the company has been integrating with various platforms and merchants to make its service available to more users. Facebook users for instance, can track their transactions through Messenger using PayPal’s integrations with the chat application.
The latest announcement will also put the payment service right before over 5 million pair of eyeballs. Slack users could well take to the bot warmly after finding that they can now make payments during the course of their conversation, simply by typing a line.
You can watch the new feature in action right below:
The feature is currently available to Slack users in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the United States. However, we can expect a global roll out to follow soon as well.
