Venmo has set a new company record by hitting the $1 billion mark.
As in $1 billion worth of payments made using Venmo during the month of January. This record number for Venmo was more than 2.5 times the payments volume the company saw the year prior in Jan. 2015.
For the full year 2015, the mobile P2P payments app processed roughly $7.5 billion, with about one-third of the transfers occurring during the holiday season (the final three months of the year). This figure was a 213 percent increase from the year prior. Venmo also recently made big news with the announcement of Pay with Venmo, which enables in-app purchases for certain apps. The pilot kicked off in partnership with food delivery service Munchery and sports ticketing app Gametime — two Braintree merchants that fit well with its core demographic.
The pilot program will gradually open to more consumers and merchants, with a general public launch planned for later this year.
PayPal CEO Dan Schulman spoke briefly during the latest earnings call about the decision to allow consumers to use Venmo to pay merchants. He indicated that one big push for doing so is to connect with the app’s young, millennial user base. From the merchant perspective, there is a benefit since they can see how their users use Venmo to pay and send money (because of the social feed aspect of the app). For merchants who allow Venmo payments, they will be charged a fee of 2.9 percent of the transaction cost (plus a $0.30 charge per transaction). Users don’t pay any extra for using the service.
As for the financial impact of Venmo on the company, Schulman noted that he doesn’t expect to see “meaningful revenue” come from Venmo until 2017 or 2018. Venmo processed $2.5 billion in payment volume in 2015’s Q4, which was a 174 percent YOY increase from 2014.