PayPal Integrates With Acorns

PayPal announced Monday (Nov. 20) it has inked a deal with Acorns, the investing platform, in which customers can use PayPal to fund their investment accounts.

In a corporate blog post, PayPal said the deal with Acorns is part of the company’s focus to help consumers take better control of their financial planning and to build fiscal wellness. With more than 2.3 million people in the U.S. investing via Acorns, it seemed logical to partner with them.

“Together, Acorns and PayPal are helping [to] democratize financial services and offering innovative solutions to the people typically underserved by the current system,” said Joanna Lambert, VP of consumer financial services, in the blog post. “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.”

Once customers link their PayPal accounts with Acorns, they can choose to set up either a recurring or one-time investment that is funded via the PayPal account. Users will also be able to monitor their Acorns accounts from within PayPal, either on the internet or in the mobile app. That, says PayPal, will give customers better visibility for expense management and savings building.

Users will have the ability to check their Acorns account value, monitor investment contributions and manage both one-time and recurring transfers. That is in addition to the existing functionality, which lets PayPal users utilize the Acorns Round-Ups feature on PayPal purchases, automatically investing the round-ups into a low-cost, diversified portfolio of exchange-traded funds.

The deal with Acorns comes as PayPal is making it easier for customers to engage in a wide range of activities. Earlier this month, it announced its new Money Pool feature, which is a free and easy way to collect and keep track of money for group gifts. PayPal describes a Money Pool as “a more personalized and organized way to collect money with family and friends, while also easing the burden of someone having to front the money or chase people to pay you back.” Once a user creates a Money Pool, he can share the link with other PayPal gift givers via text, email, Facebook or Twitter to start collecting. All of the contributions are tracked in the pool’s activity feed and go straight to the PayPal account to spend when the buyer is ready.