Let’s start this post with a tag line from Venmo – It’s like your phone and your wallet had a beautiful baby. Venmo is an App for iPhone, Android and Blackberry that one can use to pay back their friends. This app makes mobile payment easy and hassle free.
What can you do with Venmo? Well, many things. Split restaurant bills and pay back your friends, pay your roommates back for living expenses like utilities, rent and groceries, pay back for those coffee bills, send some birthday cash and what not. But don’t think Venmo as a replacement of your credit card, as it cannot be used to pay at your friendly wall mart store, it cannot process any such type of payments. It’s like a mini mobile payment system, especially for you and your friends and co-workers.
How Venmo Works
How to add funds to your Venmo account? This can be done by linking a credit card or a bank account to your phone. Once you signup, the app will take you through the complete process and it only takes a couple minutes to do this. After funds are added to your account, you can go ahead and send those funds to your friends, co-workers, roommates and dinner buddies. But note that your friends should also be having account with Venmo, or you can ask them to sign up with Venmo. You would be surprised to know that Venmo doesn’t apply any transaction fees, this is a free service. In the future, they are planning to charge businesses with a transaction fee.
One more question that may come to your mind is how would you get money out of Venmo account? Just connect your bank account and then withdraw the funds to that account.
Venmo is social. You can share select payments with your friends with Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare as a way of telling them what you’re up to. This is a fun way to engage with Venmo, and you get to leave comments on shared payments. Only friends you explicitly accept can see the payments you share, this means you have complete control over the privacy settings. This means that you’re not just paying, you’re social paying.
The sender can send funds to any US cellphone number or email address. But what if a person who is receiving money doesn’t have Venmo account? In this case, the user will be prompted to sign up to claim their funds.
I know many of you must be thinking why should be we try our hands on Venmo, when we already have PayPal. There is a PayPal app for iOS and Android then should you be trying out this new form of mobile payment? Probably yes, as because Venmo is not just about sending money, its about sharing bills and showing them that you care about your friends. If your friends owes you money, then use Venmo.
Things just doesn’t end with mobile app. There is also a web interface at the official site where you can manage your setting and account information as well as pay and charge friends.
There are still a large herd of people who are not comfortable with mobile payments. Would they turn to this app? Its time to change this thinking and try out this app.
NOTE: Always ensure that you are using the latest version of this app and operating system, to stay safe and secure.
Currently Venmo is only available in United States and its still in Private Beta, therefore it may have some hiccups. The company calls it as “The best payment service for friends”. Try it out, who knows you may like it.
Also see: PayPal Alternatives in India
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