“P2P payments are quickly on the way to becoming ubiquitous, and helping people pay and get paid back in moments,” Colbeci wrote.
The holiday season has been good to PayPal’s P2P payments side.
PayPal announced yesterday (Dec. 22) that PayPal saw its biggest online day of giving this year on #GivingTuesday (Dec. 1), along with Cyber Monday as its biggest online shopping day in PayPal’s history. All of that together gave what PayPal said was a record-setting week in terms of P2P payments.
This has helped PayPal register 1 million PayPal.Me links in 100 days.
The data show that PayPal saw a 121 percent increase in P2P for Christmas-related payments. PayPal also saw a 117 percent increase for P2P for gifts, when compared with just the week prior.
“People using P2P payments to pay each other back or gift money for Christmas and gifts are obviously a big factor this time of year and are among the most popular transactions we’re seeing right now. … People are turning to us for the ease and security they expect when they use digital payments to send and request money,” Meron Colbeci, Sr. Director of Core Consumer Products for PayPal, wrote in a company blog post.
PayPal.Me was launched in September to make the process easier to send and request money from friends, family and colleagues. PayPal.Me is a free, personalized service that provides users with a personal link that can be sent to anyone via text, email, instant message, social media, blog or even on the Web to get paid back instantly from the recipient’s bank or PayPal account.
Instead of just having the ability to tell someone to “PayPal me,” the PayPal.Me feature gives that person (or business) the power to directly message them that link to secure that payment in a way that’s a little less forward and a whole lot more efficient. Any person or business in the following 18 countries can create their personalized link: the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Australia, Canada, Russia, Turkey, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria.
Rattling off PayPal’s accomplishments in 2015, Colbeci wrote about how 2015 has become that largest year for P2P payments, with Venmo hitting $2.11 billion in payment volume in Q3 — which was a 201 percent YOY increase. PayPal also acquired Xoom this year.