By Meron Colbeci, Senior Director, Core Consumer Products, PayPal

By the year 2020, Gartner predicts that the average person will interact more with bots than they will with their partner. Bots have been around for more than 50 years, only now are they becoming a more visible part of our lives by helping to automate tasks. From scheduling calendar reminders, to new-to-the-market financial bots offering instant updates on your bank balance or quickly tracking expenses, each interaction is efficient, personalised and contextual.

At PayPal, we’re focused on offering our customers a variety of innovative, easy and secure ways to move and manage their money. With this in mind, we built on the Slack platform to launch PayPal’s very first bot. With 5 million daily active users, Slack is a messaging platform for teams that centralises your conversations and makes them instantly accessible wherever you go. Now with the PayPal bot, you can send money between PayPal accounts without leaving your Slack conversation.

Whether your colleague picked up the tab at lunch or you are chipping in for a group gift for a teammate’s birthday, sending money from your PayPal account to a friend’s is as easy as typing, “/PayPal send $5 to @Dave.” See for yourself!

To get started, install the PayPal bot available on the Slack App Directory. Once installed, link your PayPal account and set your preferred transaction settings, including when you want to review and approve transactions. The PayPal bot is available to Slack users in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.

Today, person-to-person payments (P2P) is one of the most used features on PayPal. In 2015 alone, PayPal Holdings processed $41B in P2P volume across PayPal, Venmo and Xoom – a 42% increase in P2P TPV YoY. In-context P2P payment solutions like the PayPal bot, voice activated payments through our recent Siri integration and in email via Microsoft’s Outlook.com are examples of how PayPal is continually contextualising how you move your money. Install the PayPal bot today by visiting the Slack App Directory.