Listening the HT Guys podcast earlier today highlighted that apparently your transactions are not private by default—one of the hosts could inspect his contacts’ dealings with impunity. In Denmark, we have MobilePay and it is everywhere—I very rarely need to use cash to pay someone, and it certainly has made sharing a restaurant bill a breeze.
This feature is almost certainly the key reason Venmo became successful.
Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
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Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#32Facebook Cash does this for free and instantly.
Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#33Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#34Facebook Cash does this for free and instantly.
The question is what is the true cost of transferring money and is Facebook losing money every time it does it in order for users to get addicted to using their service?
Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#35Venmo, PayPal et al are great examples of how the big barriers to convenience in our society are often fundamentally social and political, not technical. The technology to enable two people with smartphones to exchange money is trivial. Even the authentication bits can be made pretty trivial. But try and hook this up to where people are obligated to keep their money (banks) and to whom they must report their activities (governments, merchants, etc) and greed and other externalities conspire to ELIMINATE any savings or other benefits from the tech and actually make the situation MORE costly, less private, less safe, etc.
Venmo can give me money instantly for 25 cents is about as exciting as Facebook being able to replace my rolodex at the cost of lost privacy and contentment which is about as exciting as ugly, hard-to-navigate, and unlendable Kindle e-books being able to replace actual books from real publishers.
Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#36Oh wow great, I can pay 25 cents to banks and a startup to do something that was free and instant with cash and free and only mildly less instant with paper checks. Venmo, PayPal et al are great examples of how the big barriers to convenience in our society are often fundamentally social and political, not technical. The technology to enable two people with smartphones to exchange money is trivial. Even the authentic…
Running down to the bank to cash a check is pretty damn far away from "free and instant."
Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#37Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Used to do... Since they closed up Google Wallet. But yeah, it was easier to transfer money through Google Wallet.
Are you sure? I used Google Wallet a couple weeks back.
https://support.google.com/wallet/answer/6285486?hl=en
There was some rebranding news recently; you may see them consolidate various payment brands into the term Google Pay. But they're keeping their p2p payment feature.
Disclosure: Although I used to work at Google, I don't now and have never worked on their payment tech. I'm just a satisfied user who finds PayPal/Venmo a shady enough company to avoid when decent alternatives exist to accomplish the goal.
Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#39Oh wow great, I can pay 25 cents to banks and a startup to do something that was free and instant with cash and free and only mildly less instant with paper checks. Venmo, PayPal et al are great examples of how the big barriers to convenience in our society are often fundamentally social and political, not technical. The technology to enable two people with smartphones to exchange money is trivial. Even the authentic…
Re: Venmo can now instantly transfer money to your debit card for 25 cents
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I used Venmo for the first time, I had this concern as well, but the cost of the transaction is private to everyone outside of the parties involved (and this isn't an options choice). I switched all my transactions to private, personally, but the public by default nature of Venmo seems very intentional. They're trying to create a social network like atmosphere around payments it seems.
That only became true recently. Used to be public by default