EXCLUSIVE— Is Zelle in trouble? PayPal’s third quarter earnings, specifically the quarterly results of its popular P2P app Venmo, seem to suggest that the answer is yes.
The banks’ Venmo challenger is growing quite well, reporting just over $30 billion in transactions for the first half of 2017, but the app in question had a stellar quarter of its own.
Continuing what PayPal CEO Dan Schulman called “the magic that has made Venmo a viral phenomenon” on the company’s earnings call yesterday, the app reported $9.4 billion of total payment volume, a growth of 93% year-over-year.
In addition to Venmo’s growth, PayPal also reported strong numbers, claiming 218 million customers who seem to be increasing their use of mobile: according to the company’s earnings, about 35% of the company’s $114 billion total payment volume came from mobile, representing about $40 billion in transactions.
Zelle banks shouldn’t be worried about that growth, specifically — after all, Venmo reporting positive results at this point is hardly unexpected news — but more about how PayPal’s use of that growth could tie millennials even tighter to the P2P service.
Earlier in the week, PayPal announced that the app’s users would now be able to pay with Venmo at about two million PayPal merchants. Given that the company has also started releasing Venmo physical cards, this is a key development in payments, and in PayPal’s ability to further leverage Venmo and its attached millennial userbase.
In other words, moving Venmo into the merchant sphere will allow for more widespread usage of an app that’s already quite popular among coveted millennial users, as well as affording PayPal to do the one thing its been striving to do with the app for years: make money.
Brand recognition at the merchant point-of-sale means that millennial users will have even less incentive to switch to an alternative service, especially as PayPal continues the push with things like physical cards and additional brand partnerships.
Zelle, meanwhile, is tied to the brand recognition of its partnership banks.
Schulman said on the call of Venmo’s progress:
In addition, Venmo had its strongest net new active quarter in its history, demonstrating its growing popularity and its corresponding network effect. Our partnership strategy is a key pillar in our efforts to broaden the availability of PayPal…We are very pleased to be building on these partnerships.
Zelle is currently available as a service in mobile banking apps, whether white-labeled or not, as well as the standalone app it just launched last month.
As yet, however, the app has focused solely on P2P in an effort to nip at Venmo’s heels and appeal to millennial users, and there is no indication that Zelle plans to offer users the ability to pay merchants or to create a physical card.