PayPal just released its first very first bot, and it's going to let you make payments in Slack.
Slack users in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia will be able to use the feature, the company announced in a blog post this morning. You can download it from the Slack App Directory, and to use it, you'll have to link your PayPal and and Slack accounts. After that, you can modify settings on reviewing and approving payments.
Sending money in Slack is as easy as typing "paypal" as a slash command. Why would you want to do send money in Slack instead of Venmo or a host of other app? PayPal made a video that shows the situations where a PayPal bot would be useful, like splitting lunch bills with your colleagues or paying them for the coffee they bought for you on their way to work.
The move shows PayPal capitalizing on its most used feature, the person-to-person payment (P2P). PayPal says it processed $41 billion worth of P2P transactions across its properties (PayPal, Venmo and Xoom) in 2015. Slack has 5 million daily active users.
Although this is its first bot, it's not PayPal's first integration with other applications. In January 2016, PayPal made it possible for users of its P2P mobile app Venmo to make in-app purchases with their Venmo accounts. Last October, PayPal partnered with Facebook to let its users send money to and from their PayPal account via Messenger, and the following month PayPal made it possible for iOS users to conduct transactions by making a request to Siri.
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