Square is trying to make spending money fun. It just announced Square Cash for businesses, an extension of their service that lets individuals send money to each other via email or phone. Now, Square is giving small business owners, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits a similar straightforward option to accept money via a simple landing page with a giant cursor.

"We think everyone should have access to a fast, affordable way to get paid, without the inconvenience or lack of security of cash and paper checks," Square's Cash lead Brian Grassadonia wrote in a blog post today.

Paying businesses online provides an alternative to Square's original credit card reader for smartphones and tablets, which it launched five years ago. Square Cash likely won't replace swiping plastic at the checkout counter, but making it an option for paying businesses puts Square in the thick of the dizzying competition among ways to pay with your phone. From Apple to Venmo, the mobile options for moving money are expanding rapidly. And now with Facebook in the mix, everyone else has reason to be very, very nervous.

To use Cash, Square is asking businesses to claim what it's calling their "$Cashtags," basically their business name preceded by a dollar sign, that becomes the second half of the URL for their payment site, which they link on the back end to their bank accounts. Wikipedia, for instance, uses the tag $Wikipedia. Claiming an identifier automatically creates a payment landing page (for instance: https://cash.me/$wikipedia), where customers or donors fill in their debit card numbers to pay. Individuals can sign up for $Cashtags, too, for fundraising, to serve as a donation page for fans, or whatever other reason they might have to think lots of people would want to pay them money.

It doesn't cost a donor anything to contribute, but business owners are charged 1.5 percent per transaction—much lower than the usual 2.75 percent charged per transaction when businesses use Square's card reader to process credit card payments. Square also says the funds from Cash will go straight into the recipient's bank accounts, as opposed to the typical one to two business days before merchants receive their funds from swiped credit card payments.

Launching Square Cash for businesses is a smart move for the payments company in an increasingly crowded industry—if nothing else, it may help the startup grow the volume of payments it processes, giving Square an added stream of revenue. The startup isn't necessarily hard up, either—it recently hit a milestone of processing more than $100 million in sales in a single day. Square Cash has also been integrated with Snapchat as a way to send money via the upstart messaging service.

Still, Square has its work cut out to entice users as competition spikes from, among others, Venmo, a payments service owned by money-transfer giant PayPal that has become incredibly popular among college students and young professionals. Venmo processed more than $900 million in transactions in the fourth quarter of 2014 alone, compared to the $1 billion processed by Square in peer-to-peer payments for an entire year. (Square processes much more in its main credit card business.) Square Cash will also soon face competition from behemoths such as Facebook, which has imminent plans to launch its own payments service through the Facebook Messenger app to a massive user base of more than 500 million people worldwide.