Future Money

Venmo and Paypal

• An app that allows youngsters to exchange money and attach emojis and coarse messages to transactions is to be launched in Britain. Venmo, part of the PayPal empire, is seen as one of the apps that could lead to the death of cash as people under 30 adopt digital wallets and use smartphones to pay each other money.
  
  The peer-to-peer app has spread rapidly in America, where “millennials” use it to pay each other back for pizza or beer by “Venmoing”, rather than using cash. More than $1 billion was transferred using the app in January alone.
  
  Dan Schulman, the chief executive of PayPal, said that Venmo’s rise marked a generational shift, in that users added messages and emojis, or electronic ideograms, to transactions and did not hide how they spent their money or with whom. He argued that older users tended to be more private. The young, he said, “have taken a financial transaction and turned it into social experience. Every transaction has a comment like ‘thanks for the pizza’ or a bunch of emojis.”
  
  Mr Schulman, who led the demerger of PayPal from eBay, does not believe that cash will die out soon, with 85 per cent of the world’s transactions still completed with physical currency.
  
  The next step for PayPal is to allow Venmo users to pay at the tills with the app, which would be launched in Britain in future, Mr Schulman said.
  
  PayPal’s split from eBay last year has enabled the payments company to expand its business with customers that would use its systems only once it was independent. About half of Apple Pay merchants are using PayPal to connect to the system. while companies ranging from Alibaba to Vodafone have signed deals to use its mobile payments technology. All Uber payments are processed by PayPal. New products such as Venmo, acquired as part of the $800 million takeover of Braintree, have been given more prominence.
  
  In the battle for the mobile phone payments market, Monitise, the British company, has fallen on hard times, while Powa Technologies, a start-up offering wave and pay services, collapsed into administration last week.
  
  PayPal has a base of 180 million users of its own payment system. Its mobile transactions grew to 1.4 billion last year, a 45 per cent rise.