PayPal is letting users link their accounts to the Acorns investment app, and in doing so, the company is gaining greater access to information about user behavior in an age where data is currency and fuels artificial intelligence technology.
The Wall Street Journal noted PayPal had taken a minority stake in Acorns last year and said, “Under CEO Dan Schulman, PayPal has tried to branch out beyond its roots in payments and into other financial services geared toward consumers who lack access to bank accounts and other mainstream financial products.”
PayPal told customers, “Once your accounts are linked you can easily monitor your Acorns account right from within PayPal – online and in the PayPal mobile app – in order to provide you better visibility as you build your long-term savings” – clearly it also gives PayPal greater visibility into users’ financial activity.
Announcement follows:
Our goal at PayPal is to help consumers take better control of their financial lives. Part of this mission is to ensure we’re also helping people build financial wellness. More than 2.3 million people around the U.S. are investing in their future through Acorns to help save for long term and short term expenses like for a trip or future planning.
We’re thrilled to announce you can now use PayPal to fund an investment account with Acorns. Once you link your PayPal account to Acorns, you can choose to set-up a recurring or one-time investment funded from your PayPal account. This gives you an even easier way to save and invest money to lead healthier financial lives.
But that’s not all. Once your accounts are linked you can easily monitor your Acorns account right from within PayPal – online and in the PayPal mobile app – in order to provide you better visibility as you build your long-term savings. This will allow you to do things like check your Acorns account value, monitor your investment contributions, and manage your recurring and one-time transfers to Acorns right in the moment.
This is in addition to the existing feature allowing PayPal users to use the Acorns “Round-up” feature on PayPal purchases, automatically investing the round-ups into a low-cost, diversified portfolio of exchange-traded funds.
Together, Acorns and PayPal are helping democratize financial services and offering innovative solutions to the people typically underserved by the current system. These new features are starting to roll out to select U.S. PayPal customers today, and will be available for all U.S. customers by early 2018.
SOURCE: PayPal Announcement
