Three of the nation’s largest banks plunged into the growing battle over how consumers move money and make payments, launching a service today that lets customers use their checking accounts to send each other money with an email address or cellphone number, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Banks are looking to hold on to their influence over consumers, who are increasingly shunning checks and cash, turning instead to new nonbank technologies to spend their money. ClearXchange, the new service from Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and J.P.Morgan Chase & Co., takes aim at the popular PayPal offering. At stake are billions of dollars in credit card, overdraft and checking fees each year.

“Customers want to move payments from paper to electronic methods, so if we can meet our customers’ financial needs, they will be better customers with us,” said Mike Kennedy, who develops payment strategies at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo and is chairman of the new venture.

Google Inc. has its own designs on the payments business, and hopes to facilitate payments as well as special offers that local merchants can send directly to customers’ smartphones. Consumers are expected to spend more than $1.2 billion this year on local-merchant deals provided through Internet companies such as Groupon Inc., according to BIA/Kelsey, an advisory firm.

On Thursday, Google, which declined to comment, is expected to announce details about a service that will allow consumers to make store purchases and redeem coupons by waving Google-powered smartphones in front of a small reader at checkout counters, said people familiar with the matter.

The moves will mean an even more crowded market for Des Moines-based Dwolla Corp., which offers a location-based payment technology that allows cellphone users to locate and pay participating retailers with their phones by using their keypad, rather than waving the phone at a reader. Dwolla’s system charges retailers a flat fee of 25 cents per transaction, providing them with an alternative to paying card issuer transaction fees. Related Business Record story: Dwolla launches location-based payment system

With the initiatives, Americans will soon have an unprecedented number of payment options that could further reduce the use of traditional methods. The services from both Google and the banks will rely on the cellphone, which could soon become the digital wallet that has been promised for more than a decade.