Venmo Gaining Ground, Has Plans to Bring in More Cash
It wasn’t so long ago that Venmo was seemingly under fire from all sides. Its security was at issue, along with some less-than-encouraging responses to issues experienced.
However, things have only improved at Venmo in recent days, and the company that formerly seemed like a disaster is looking to expand, and deliver some new monetization options as well.
A recent study of Venmo from The Motley Fool revealed that Venmo’s primary advantage as a peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payments operation gave it something of an advantage in a field where P2P often got short shrift.
Some even used it as a means to save money on bank transfers from a Bank of America account, a development that may have annoyed Bank of America brass, but one that gave users plenty of reason to rejoice.
Though Venmo didn’t have a big part of the P2P market in 2015—the whole market was between $70 and $90 billion—that’s improved significantly, and in a fairly short time; just in January 2016, it was responsible for $1 billion in transfers all by itself.
That’s a good sign of fairly rapid gain, and since there are sound use cases involved in Venmo—particularly for anyone who’s going out for an evening and needs a convenient way to split a check via mobile device—the company has some clear room to work.
It also has some room to expand; it’s already a comparatively small part of PayPal’s overall operation, and that room may be encouraging some investors to step in.
Venmo, comparatively speaking, is still a very early-stage project, and within the next two or three years, it could have a serious value proposition to bring to the table.
The good news is that Venmo has been operating in a segment of the mobile payments field that hasn’t seen a lot of commerce before.
The P2P field was often ignored by major figures like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, so since it’s been able to operate here for a while, it could hold its market.
The question is, however, whether or not it can compete if the majors swing into P2P, and if Venmo can hold its crowd in the face of a preferred payment system getting in.
Only time will tell just where Venmo can go, but it’s got quite a bit of momentum on its side.