UK start-up GoCardless has unveiled a service that lets any business or person to collect one-off, regular and pre-authorised payments online via a shareable link.
The company says that anyone with a e-mail address and UK bank account can sign up for PayLinks - dubbed bitly for payments - within 60 seconds and start carrying out transactions immediately.
Users enter an amount and a description and GoCardless generates a URL - the PayLink - that can be shared across the Web, either embedded on a site as a 'buy now' button, e-mailed out to customers with invoices, or tweeted.
To make a payment, a payer just clicks the link and enters their bank details into a secure payment page.
The PayLinks service, which is officially launching following a beta phase, is the second product from GoCardless, which earlier this year launched a Rest API wrapper for bank transfers which over 2000 businesses have signed up for.
Matt Robinson, co-founder, GoCardless, says: "The goal of GoCardless is to make payments as simple as possible. We believe that PayLinks is a natural extension of our API product; it's designed to be used by literally anyone, and it is also a great way for merchants interested in a deeper API integration to get a flavour for what we can offer."