PayPal now has a Slack bot so you can pay back your coworkers and it seems that it really couldn’t be easier to use. Payments can be made between users in Slack without having to leave a current conversation, so if you’re gathering orders for a coffee run your coworkers can send money from their PayPal account to yours right from that conversation thanks to the new bot. To send a payment, all you have to do is type /PayPal, then type the word send and follow it up with the amount of money you want to send, and lastly finish off with mentioning the recipient, for example, @justin.
Once this is done you’ll get a notification in the chat channel from the PayPal bot to verify your login credentials, and after that you’ll see a new window pop up over the chat channel to enter your PayPal account information, after which the bot will automatically send the money to the recipient. While that all seems easy enough, there are a couple of steps that have to be taken first.
The PayPal bot will have to be installed and this can be picked up from the Slack App Directory. From there, users will need to link their PayPal account information and their preferred transaction settings. This means that if the user you’re trying to send money to hasn’t linked their PayPal account with the PayPal Slack bot, then you won’t be able to send the money as there will be no PayPal account to send it to. As part of configuring transaction settings, users will have the ability to set when they want to review and approve payments, so this can be done right away if you prefer or you can set it to a later time. While it’s likely that the bot will roll out more widely eventually, right now the PayPal Slack bot is only available to users in the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Canada. PayPal states that this is their very first bot, although it isn’t the first time they’ve integrated their services into another chat app. Facebook’s Messenger application gained compatibility with PayPal and allowed users to send PayPal payments through the app as of last October, although it wasn’t a bot and was just one of the new payment options.