Payments company PayPal unveiled a new feature that gives merchants realtime access to funds from completed sales. The feature, revealed today, is aptly called Funds Now.
Like Uber’s Instant Pay, PayPal’s Funds Now feature gives select businesses across the U.S., U.K., and Australia instant access to their completed sales within seconds by eliminating holds, delays, and reserves. PayPal is currently working on enabling Funds Now to ensure money won’t be held during disputes, except for certain special cases of identity fraud or account takeover.
The feature, which is free, has already rolled out to more than one million customers.
Currently, it is being introduced to select businesses, with “good standing,” according to an email sent to Bank Innovation. This criterion includes that the merchant must have a PayPal account for more than six months, with a strong selling record, successful transactions, low incidence of claims and disputes, among other things.
Right now, the feature is available on an invitation basis, where PayPal emails the merchant inviting them to enroll in the feature by, in some cases, confirming phone numbers or other information related to your identity.
This new feature is part of PayPal’s strategy of expanding its goods and services to its merchant clients, specifically in this case- its small business clients. This strategy has been reiterated by CEO Dan Schulman in the company’s last quarterly earnings when he said that it aims to is to become a full commerce solution for merchants.
And indeed, the company has been expanding its presence in this market with acquisitions like its $2.2 billion acquisition of Swedish small business commerce platform iZettle in May. In terms of products and features, there has been no dearth of these as well. Over the past year, it released PayPal Business Debit Mastercard, PayPal Working Capital, PayPal Business Loans, and most recently PayPal Checkout with Smart Payments Button, which also enables businesses to accept all payments in over 100 different currencies.
It also provides its SMB merchants access to a Disputes API, that lets them manage and resolve disputes and chargebacks from their customers.
As for its merchant customers, PayPal currently has 19.5 million business clients, “the vast majority of which are small businesses,” a PayPal spokesperson told Bank Innovation via email.
For retail consumers, PayPal is in the process of rolling out a new mobile app in the U.S. in the coming weeks.
Last month, PayPal announced it would roll out the new app which has advanced authentication features, 24/7 fraud monitoring, and instant account notifications, among other things. The feature has already been rolled out in Italy and Australia as of last month.
See how this new app works here.







