PayPal is calling Venmo up to the big leagues, leaving the app’s old function of peer-to-peer payments behind. Venture Beat reports that PayPal announced an in-the-works service called Pay with Venmo. As the name suggests, the service will let you use Venmo to pay at any PayPal merchant.
If you’ve used PayPal One Touch, you’ve used the Venmo technology. When PayPal acquired Braintree in 2013 they also got Venmo, which used to be accepted as a form of payment in some mobile apps. PayPal took the Venmo tech and merged it with PayPal One Touch. Now the Pay with Venmo service promises to be more than a simple tap-to-pay function.
Since Venmo is a mostly free service (it only charges a fee if you pay with a credit card) it wasn’t making PayPal much money at first. But millennials like Venmo, and we know companies will do pretty much anything to keep that group happy.
