Online payment processing king PayPal announced a new person-to-person service on Tuesday, September 1st, that makes it easy to request and receive money from almost anyone. PayPal.me allows users to request money through a personalized link that can be sent via email, text or social media. Recipients can then pay easily from their own PayPal account by just clicking on the link.
According to PayPal, the main idea is to minimize the potential awkwardness that many people feel when asking friends and/or family to repay a debt. The service works by requesting a specific amounts of money at the end of your PayPal.me link. For example, a link “paypal.me/John Doe/30” is in effect a request for $30.
Financial sector analysts point out that PayPal.me is one of a half-dozen peer-to-peer payment services that have popped up this year, including Square Cash, Google’s Android Pay, and PayPal’s Venmo, which is just available in the U.S.
PayPal.me goes live in the U.S., UK, and 16 other countries on Tuesday.
Further details on PayPal.me
According to the PayPal press release, using PayPal.me just takes three simple steps:
- Share your personalized PayPal.Me link via a text, over email, instant messenger, social media, blog or on even on the web.
- Recipients then just click the link on any device (mobile phone, tablet or computer) they are using.
- Then they enter the amount, hit send and the money is transferred directly into your PayPal account.
Adults across the globe are owed more than $51 billion in small debts from friends and family, based on data from a recent PayPal Money Habits Study. Most of this money goes unclaimed because people don’t want to spend the time and effort to chase down these small debts, never mind have an awkward face-to-face conversation about money owed. That study determined that more than half of Americans find it awkward to request that their friends or family pay them back money that they are owed. A revolutionary innovation in payments technology, PayPal.Me makes it a snap to request payments and to get paid.
