At PayPal, we’re committed to offering you secure, easy and simple ways to send money between friends and family. Whether it’s chipping in for dinner or a gift, splitting the cost of groceries or paying your share of the utilities, with PayPal peer-to-peer (P2P) payments you can send or receive money with just about anyone you want in just a few taps.
Recently, we’ve made some enhancements to make it even easier to send or request money between friends and family on PayPal, while also making some updates to the PayPal profile’s search settings in the app to help you make sure you’re sending money to the right person. Here’s what’s new:
Easily find and pay your friends and family
Over the coming weeks, we’re making some updates to the search settings for a PayPal profile to help you find the right person to pay back or request money from. With the new settings, when someone searches for you using your name, username, email or phone number, they will be able to see your PayPal profile photo as well as any additional information you have chosen to make public in your profile settings. Previously, when paying in these ways, in most cases they wouldn’t have received verification that you had a PayPal account before sending the payment.
The newly simplified settings give you three choices:
- Personal profile info: the new search settings will automatically let people within the PayPal network search for you by name, email, phone number, or username when sending you money.
- PayPal.Me link: we’re also enabling anyone outside of the PayPal network to send you money using your unique link.
- Payment requests: the new settings also let people search for you by name, email, phone number, or username when they want to request money from you.
We want to ensure you have control over the amount of information someone can view when searching for you, which is why you can turn off these settings at any time. Other people will still be able to send money to your email address or phone number like they have in the past, but the sender won’t be able to verify that you have an account on PayPal before sending the payment. To manage your search privacy settings, go to Profile, select Data and Privacy, and select Search privacy. From there, you can choose how you want people to search for you by toggling your controls on or off.
If you previously had one or more settings turned off, you will continue to see the old privacy settings and be found in search results according to the previous settings you had chosen. Otherwise, if you take no action, your information will be searchable starting September 5, 2023.
Scan and pay – new personal PayPal QR Codes for P2P payments
In addition to the new search functionality, we’ve started rolling out another way to make it easier for friends and family to pay you back. With the introduction of personal P2P QR Codes in the PayPal app, you can simply open the PayPal app, pull up your own code, and let friends scan it (or share the code via email, text, or AirDrop for example). This will help make sure you’re paying the right person. When sending money, you can ask the intended recipient to open the PayPal app and share their code, and you can also choose if you want that payment to be tagged as for Friends and Family, or for Goods and Services.