It has been an interesting couple of weeks regarding the push and pull between fintech firms and established payments players. First Visa appears to have gotten the slightly better end of the deal in their arrangement with PayPal and now, the Wall Street Journal is reporting on the strides that big banks are making to introduce person to person (P2P) payment services will challenge Venmo, PayPal, Facebook and Square:
J.P. Morgan Chase $ Co., Wells Fargo & Co. and other large banks recently unveiled their Venmo counterattack: enhancements to a five-year-old joint venture called clearXchange. The bank-owed payments platform has started offering real-time payments, as opposed to transactions that take up to three days to settle.
The importance of P2P services was underscored as it becomes more engrained in the way consumers manage a portion of their payments.
While banks and PayPal generally don’t collect fees form customers on such payments, the business I viewed as a basic service that can lead to other lucrative transactions such as lending and payments to merchants.
“Whoever wins the battle for person-to-person payments ultimately has the ability to win all of payments, because customers want control over their own money, said Osama Bedier, a veteran payments executive who has worked at Google and PayPal
Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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