Venmo, a P2P mobile payments service, has completed more than two years of beta testing and is now ready to introduce its product to the public. From a New York Times blog post:
“We were waiting to perfect the payment experience before releasing it to the public,” said Iqram Magdon-Ismail, who founded Venmo along with Andrew Kortina. “We feel good about opening up now. We’re anticipating lots of volume and we have the right team in place to handle that.”
The service originally was designed to send money via text message. Venmo, however, since has developed Android and iPhone mobile applications. Money transferred now appears in the receiver’s bank account overnight as opposed to the multiple days required at the beginning of the testing period.
Venmo currently processes approximately $10 million in transactions monthly and that figure is growing 30 percent each month. The company currently charges no transaction fees, but intends to introduce them for a small business-oriented service. Ultimately, Venmo’s stated goal is to have their service completely replace credit cards.
The company believes its advantage over similar services, such as those designed by PayPal and Visa, is its social nature: users can attach the product to Facebook in order to keep a running tally of how much they have paid friends and for what services.
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