PayPal and Siri will now talk about giving your money away
Can’t get Apple Pay from your bank? You can at least get Apple’s Siri to fling money around via PayPal.
The ongoing saga of Apple Pay’s slow adoption in Australia, which includes the recent news that payments processor Cuscal has signed up 31 smaller banks and credit unions to the service, still leaves a lot of Australians who use the three of the big four banks out in the cold for contactless payments with their iPhones - unless they fancy slapping NFC stickers or cases on them.
PayPal has announced that it’s now integrated Siri commands into its iOS app, allowing you to send money via its app to just about anyone you choose. Apple had announced that it was opening up Siri integration to third party applications in iOS 10, and PayPal isn’t even the first payment processor to do so; Square Cash already has this functionality enabled. Still, PayPal’s wider reach and brand awareness does give it a certain leg-up in this regard.
If you’re concerned about the possibility of miscreants grabbing your phone and sending your PayPal balance to themselves, the app uses two factor authentication that has to be pre-approved before PayPal will work that way, and it only works on an unlocked iPhone, which means that if you’ve got TouchID enabled, it’s pretty much exactly as secure as Apple Pay itself.Latest mobile phones headlines
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