Venmo now for more than paying friends

Payments app owned by PayPal seeks to make purchases social.

Mobile payment apps are easy ways for people to send money to each other — digital replacements for the cash used to pay back a friend for beers or the $50 birthday check to your granddaughter.

But some peer-to-peer, or p2p, payment systems are looking beyond payments between friends and family, hoping to replace other types of transactions too. That includes payments to online merchants, disbursements from insurance companies and perhaps even paychecks.

Last year, Venmo expanded beyond its peer-to-peer roots and started allowing users to make purchases through the apps of a handful of online merchants.

For the payments app, which is owned by PayPal, the move into retail payments is a potential money maker. Individual users don’t pay to send or receive most payments, but businesses that accept Venmo pay a fee for each transaction.

For that fee, businesses get access to one of Venmo’s unique features: its social network.

When Venmo users transfer money to friends, they write messages — often in emoji form — indicating what the payment is for. Pizza, beer, rent. Those messages, if users opt in, can be seen by other Venmo users.

The same is true of Venmo’s new Pay with Venmo feature. If a user buys dinner through the food delivery service Munchery, that’s noted in the Venmo feed.

In its pitch to businesses, Venmo makes that case that by accepting Venmo as a payment option, merchants can “stand out by offering a new social currency to a mobilefirst audience” and “generate exposure for your brand when users share their purchases on the Venmo feed.”

So far, Venmo has targeted what spokesman Josh Criscoe called “more social merchants” — ones whose goods or services are likely to be shared and paid for by a group. That includes Munchery, sports ticket seller Gametime and post-bar hamburger staple White Castle.

As Venmo moves into merchant payments, banks are moving in the opposite direction, pitching their peer-to-peer payment systems as a way for big businesses to send money to their customers or even employees.