PayPal has just launched its own peer-to-peer payment service to compete with the likes of Square Cash and Google Wallet.
It’s called PayPal.me, and it’s a custom URL that’s linked to your PayPal account.
Users can send their custom URL to friends and family as an easy way to request money.
“PayPal.Me is a free, simple, and personal way to request money from anyone across the globe. It’s a link you can personalize with your name and send to groups of friends, family and colleagues for a quick, hassle-free way to pay you back quickly. 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,” says PayPal.
You can head on over to PayPal.me right now to snag your own custom URL. I got PayPal.me/joshwolford, so if you go right now you might be able to grab your name without incident (depending on how common your name is).
Here’s what it looks like when someone clicks on your custom URL:
The service launches today in 18 countries: U.S., Germany, UK, Australia, Canada, Russia, Turkey, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria. PayPal says this will help put a dent in the $51 billion in IOUs floating around in friend and family debt. I don’t know about all that, but it is definitely an easier way to use PayPal.