Venmo is a division of PayPal that came with the Braintree acquisition in 2013. It’s a person to person payments service that’s particularly popular with younger folk and millennials. More precise details will apparently be presented in the second quarter earnings of PayPal expected in July.
PayPal VP Brad Brodigan said: “We will be rolling that out in the near future, and expect to expand it significantly during 2017. We have been testing it on merchant websites, and want to make sure that we have the user experience just right, but [it] is something we’ll talk about with our next earnings report.”
PayPal is reportedly testing Venmo payments with a small number of “select users” and moving away from its peer-to-peer roots. Apparently the Venmo feature for in-app payments with sellers and service providers. It also comes at a time when Apple Pay has announced it will be offering person to person payments in iMessage.
It’s been nearly two years since the eBay/PayPal divorce and it looks like PayPal is starting to pull away and offer some distinct offerings in the PayPal sphere. It also speaks to the ongoing development of smartphone payments. PayPal might not be the gold standard payments service for younger users so an expansion of Venmo is taking PayPal-like services to where the potential market users are.
