PayPal launches PayPal.Me, a simpler way to request money using your own personalized URL

Paypal has introduced a new person-to-person payments feature which enables account holders to request money from friends, family and colleagues via a personalised URL. For the first time, PayPal customers will be able to set up their own user profiles which are associated with a personalized URL (e.g. paypal.me/username), which can then be shared with others via text, over email, on instant messenger, via social media, or anywhere else, as a way to request moneyacross any device. PayPal.Me is being rolled out across the globe, with 18 countries in the first wave to go live.

Meron Colbeci, senior director of global product, PayPal, says: „PayPal.Me makes requesting money from groups of friends, family and colleagues suddenly so much easier and faster. It’s an instant, safe, unique link that works on any device no matter where you’re talking to people – in a text, email, instant messenger, social media post, blog, or on the web.”

He points to a recent PayPal Money Habits study of 4000 consumers in the US, Canada, Germany and Australia, which estimated that adults worldwide are owed more than $51 billion in IOUs from friends and family.

„These billions of dollars go unclaimed simply because people hate spending the time to chase down debts, and have those awkward face-to-face conversations,” says Colbeci. „That same study found that over 50 percent of Americans find it awkward to ask their friends or family to pay them back. But PayPal.Me changes everything about getting paid back.”

„The new service we are announcing today, is our way to make sure you have a digital option to get your money back, that you can use in the context of your conversations on social media and take some of the friction and embarrassment out of actually asking to be paid back. By launching a brand new person-to-person payment service called PayPal.Me, we hope to make asking for IOUs and transferring money to friends and family quicker and easier than ever.”, says on PayPal blog.

According to finextra.com, in March, PayPal rival Square launched a similar service dubbed ‘$Cashtags’, unique identifiers, that link to payment pages or can be used with the Square Cash app to instantly exchange cash with contacts.