Today, Venmo is known as the app that causes outrage in some relationships by making it easy to request a refund for even the smallest of things. But it was the hottest payments app for a long time. The app hasn’t changed much in recent years and feels like it’s seen better days.
That is changing a little bit today with the announcement of payment planning and recurring. Starting soon, you’ll be able to schedule a payment to your roommate so that half of your utility bill is automatically sent to them at the same time every month. Or vice versa your roommate can deduct your half of the rent every month on the 30th. The point is that it’s set-it-and-forget-it, among people who already use Venmo. The company says it’s been a much-requested feature.
Venmo says users who receive a scheduled payment request will see the request as an app notification, and can cancel the request at any time in their settings. They will also receive a reminder of the payment request the day before it is set to be processed. It is not clear whether users will have to approve the repeat request once or each time it is set to repeat (access comments).
Scheduled payments can be set to occur once, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
Venmo is still a popular peer-to-peer payments app but it also functions as a bank today with direct deposit and debit and credit cards. The new feature should be a welcome addition to people already in the ecosystem.
Despite having a better-known product, Venmo is actually smaller today in terms of transaction volume than Zelle, which also allows fast payments and was created as a collaboration between major banks, which saw Venmo as a threat. Zelle already has a payment system, so this helps Venmo get there.
Before anyone can say-sure, crypto could do all this already. We are not having that conversation.
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