Square introduced Square Cash Tuesday, a new way to send and receive cash from your friends or acquaintances using email — no account or sign-up required.

“The idea is to allow anyone to send money to anyone else using the tools in their pocket,” Square’s Brian Grassadonia told Mashable. Built on top of email, the service lets you send money by sending an email to your friend with an amount as the subject line and copying cash@square.com on the message.

To collect funds, you click a link in your received email, which takes you to the Square Cash website. Once there, you enter in the debit card information for the account you’d like Square to deposit the money into. After you’ve accepted funds at an email address, you can then send them from the same address using the same debit card. Or you can begin by entering your debit card information into the website to send funds.




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Cash works with any email address, from your old Yahoo address to the one issued by your employer. Unlike other services, it only requires your debit card number — not your bank routing information — to transfer funds from your account to and from friends or colleagues via email. Funds are available in one to two business days.

There’s no account to sign up for or sign into, and the service will work from your email account through any mail app or mail client you might be using.




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“It’s a tool you can use no matter where you are,” says Grassadonia. He says the service was built on top of email in order to make it something anyone can use. You don’t need a smartphone or even your own computer, just a debit card (credit cards won’t fly) and an email address.

For the app lovers out there, Square launched a Square Cash app for iOS and Android Tuesday as well. The app’s only function is to fill out an email for you — it then launches the native mail app on your device so you can finish sending the message.

News of Square Cash originally surfaced in May. At the time the service was in private beta, and was charging 50 cents per transaction.

Now it’s free to send and receive funds using the service. The only restriction is how much cash you can send, which is currently capped at $2500 per week. There’s no limit to how much money you can receive.

Square Cash is currently available in the U.S. only.

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