About a week ago, PayPal launched its first bot for users of team messaging app, Slack. The bot lets people send peer-to-peer payments for up to $10,000 in a single transaction.
The bot is available as a Slack app through the company’s online directory. It can be used by typing “/PayPal” followed by a command once it’s installed. For example: “/PayPal send $5 to @Michelle.”
As people are turning away from cash and moving towards making payments digitally, PayPal is trying to capitalize on this growing demand for P2P payments. Because Slack already engages 5 million daily active users, PayPal has made a strategic move to launch a bot on its platform and take advantage of their growing user base and the company’s potential growth and expansion. With this, PayPal is ahead of the game and is hoping to establish itself as the payment service of choice for Slack users. I think there is great potential for this bot. Since Slack is usually used at work, I can see this being popular among co-workers. Co-workers can use the bot to split a lunch order for a team outing, coffee morning runs, or splitting a cab fare, and other quick P2P payments. I think this bot is promising since it will allow Slack users to send money without ever having to leave the messing app. This provides Slack users with more of an incentive to use the bot versus other P2P platforms like Venmo.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/paypal-adds-p2p-bot-for-slack-2017-2
Being able to send payments over Slack is a good feature, as a lot of businesses do use this platform. However, one thing that I notice is that a lot of applications have this feature (snapchat, Facebook messenger). I think from a consumer’s perspective, I would like to have just one application dedicated to making payments. Having various applications that do the same thing, makes the consumer confused and question which app to use.