Visa put out a news release Wednesday morning muddled with the usual financial jibberish: “Visa Moves Beyond the Point-of-Sale,” the headline read. But what Visa is proposing is a potential serious rival for PayPal.

Visa said it will soon allow people to send money to each other using Visa credit or debit cards or pre-paid accounts. So next time you need to pay the babysitter, the checkbook can stay in your wallet.

Here’s how Visa explains it:

“Bank customers of participating financial institutions will have the option to select a Visa account as the destination for funds when making a personal payment. By simply entering the recipient’s 16-digit Visa account, e-mail address or mobile phone number, consumers can send funds directly from their bank account to a recipient’s Visa account. This makes sending money to a niece for her birthday or to a son in college simpler, faster, and more convenient than before.”

PayPal is the big daddy of digital payments, and a stable of startups, including Venmo, are springing up to allow people to swap money with text messages or mobile devices.

PayPal said it doesn’t directly comment on competitors. But the eBay unit did say: “As the leader in global online payments for the last 12 years, PayPal has unmatched advantages that we believe put us ahead of the competition. PayPal connects to 57 different financial networks and 15,000 local banks in 190 markets — not just in the Visa network, but with payment methods that meet our customers’ preferences in markets around the world.”