PayPal launches Slack bot for peer-to-peer payments

By Khari Johnson for VentureBeat

PayPal today launched its first bot for users of team messaging app Slack. The bot lets people send peer-to-peer (P2P) payments with the shortcode /paypal and a user’s Slack handle. Watch those keystrokes though: $10,000 can be sent in a single transaction, a PayPal spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

PayPal bot is now available to Slack users in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, the payments company announced in a blog post.

Slack currently has five million daily active users and 1.5 million paying subscribers, up from 4 million and 1.25 million last October. The Slack App Directory has more than 900 bots for things like task automation, the reinforcement of company culture, and integrations with SAAS and productivity software.

The PayPal bot follows the launch last week of Slack Enterprise Grid, a service for large corporations. As part of the Enterprise Grid, SAP launched its first-ever bots for Concur expenses and SuccessFactors human relations.

This is PayPal’s first bot but not its first venture into the emerging chatbot ecosystem. Last November, PayPal joined Square Cash and Venmo to allow P2P payments with Siri. Weeks earlier, PayPal and Stripe joined a Facebook Messenger beta program to accept payments through the platform.

First appeared at VB