PayPal certainly isn’t stalling its innovations for customers.
The company is continuing to expand its roster of new features with the launch of instant bank transfers for Visa and Mastercard users, announced today.
The service will go live for all users next month, and will cost $0.25 per transaction–cheaper than competitor services, like Square. It also ensures a needed immediacy both in PayPal and Venmo–funds will appear, well, instantly into a user’s bank account, as opposed to the day it would normally take, making situations like “Craigslist Jeff” unlikely to occur.
The continuing rate of innovation is probably why PayPal isn’t at all worried about other technology companies, such as Apple Pay, making P2P plays.
In fact, the company’s CEO, Dan Schulman, seemed unimpressed with Apple Pay’s up-and-coming money transfer feature — which will allow iPhone users to transfer funds via Apple Pay to other iPhone users — during a Telegraph interview yesterday. Schulman noted that Venmo owns “the full value proposition” of P2P — providing onboarding and a social feed for friends, as well as the ability to make payments across operating systems. Apple Pay, as noted, currently does not work with Android devices, and neither will the new P2P feature, to be released in the fall.
Apple, Schulman continued, “can never [own] that, because they don’t do the risk associated with it … they can only provide what they hope is a good user interface.”
All in all, it seems as though Schulman doesn’t regard Apple’s P2P play as much of a “Venmo-killer.”
Scott Harkey, payments practice lead for consultancy company Levvel, told Bank Innovation:
While I do expect Apple Pay Cash to gain some traction within the iMessage space, I don’t really see it pulling large amounts of volume from Venmo or its competitors. I actually think Zelle will be more of a competitor for Venmo for certain demographics than Apple Pay Cash due to its ubiquity across all device types and its existing stronghold within the banks.
Zelle recently made P2P waves with the second stage of its launch (putting the Zelle-branded experience into the existing apps of 12 banks), with a standalone app to come. Meanwhile, Venmo’s popularity continues to swell, with its users accounting for a fair amount of the $7 million an hour sent by PayPal products, according to the company.