If You Could Send Money To A Blue Tick, I Might Just Get One

Visa
V
have launched their “Visa+” service, initially through partners PayPal and Venmo, with the admirable aim of helping people to send money between different payment apps. The basic idea is to create a directory of “pay names” so that you can send money to (eg) dgwbirch without having to know whether dgwbirch is using this app or that app, this network or that network. Think how much easier life will be when you can just put a pay name on your business card so that anyone can send you money without having to know your routing code and account number or your Venmo handle or your Visa card number!

Pay Names

The idea of using some kind of unique personal identifier to route payments (a “pay name”) is not new and there are different kinds of pay names out there now. I set up $dgwbirch on Square Cash, for example, and you can pay my invoices through paypal.me/15MbLtd if you want to, and if you want to donate to my favourite charity (the Dave Birch Holiday Home in the South of France Emergency Appeal Fund) then you can give generously to dgwbirch.eth rather than having to copy and paste an Etherum address from somewhere.