By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 23rd, 2024
Online payments giant is adding Venmo as a new payment option and is planning for more partnerships with companies across multiple sectors.
PayPal has integrated a social payments service Venmo to make it available during the checkout process. Customers will now be able to make purchases via their Venmo balances, without the need to open PayPal accounts.
According to PayPal, there will be no additional cost to merchants for using the service. Besides, they don’t have to introduce any changes to their PayPal integration in order to accept Venmo payments. Initially, Venmo will be available for mobile transfers only, while desktop support may be launched in the future.
Venmo is a popular payment service in the United States, used mostly by milennials. The platform allows users to receive money from friends and family and share payments and purchases through a social feed. The company was launched in 2009 and three years after it was acquired by Braintree for $26.2 million. In 2013, PayPal bought Braintree for $800 million.
PayPal has recently unveiled its financial results after the company’s split from eBay in 2015. As Marketwatch reports, PayPal is focused on more partnerships and will likely collaborate with companies that had been its competitors.
“It’s hard to overstate the difference in the relationships we now have with companies across multiple sectors who were previously viewed as potential competitors,” said PayPal chief executive, Dan Schulman. “We are now collaborating as strong and supportive allies.”
Last month, PayPal partnered with Android Pay to let anyone with a PayPal account to use their credentials for purchases at merchants that accept Android Pay. The agreement is part of the company’s strategy to deal with more companies in the ecosystem.
PayPal unveiled that its mobile payment volume increased by 51%, with 32% of its payments were conducted via mobile devices. These numbers are likely to grow in view of the company’s integration with Venmo.
The company’s total payment volume reached $99 billion in the quarter, rising by 23% from a year ago. The number of active merchant accounts on PayPal achieved 16 million by the end of March.
Venmo, meantime, processed $6.8 billion of its total payment volume in the first quarter of 2017, which more than doubled from a year ago. The service is becoming a leader not only in the P2P payments market, but in the whole mobile payments sector, as more people use it for mobile transactions.
Apple Pay will soon become a direct competitor to PayPal’s Venmo, as the company is going to launch its own peer-to-peer money transfer service. The new feature will reportedly be launched later this year and Apple is already in talks with a number of financial firms.
About a month ago, Facebook expanded its Messenger platform to group payments. The new option, which was previously limited to two people, allows users to send or request money from groups of people to divide the cost of a bill or a gift.