Forget M-Pesa, On Venmo You Can Send Money to Friends For Free and It's Also a Social Networking Platform

Today the whole world knows about M-Pesa, the pioneer in mobile money and transactions. And everybody has been trying to replicate or improve this new technology to suit whatever part of the world they live in.

Meanwhile for Safaricom’s competitors, they felt they had to evolve to include movile money to their business and from this came services like Airtel Money, Orange Money and YuCash. But none of the other services managed to catch up to M-Pesa as Safaricom always came up with more ways to integrate M-Pesa into the daily lives of their customers.
But other than Mobile Banking, Lipa na M-Pesa, M-Shwari, sending and receiving money, M-Pesa has pretty much stagnated with no new innovations happening around it. However on the other side of the world where they’ve been trying to take the idea behind M-Pesa and improved it, they might have just stumbled upon something that might change the way people send money on mobile phones.

Like M-Pesa Venmo is a mobile application that allows users to send money to friends for free but what really stands out, is that it also doubles as a social network.
And just like any other social networking platform Venmo has a newsfeed on which transactions between friends are highlighted which also shows new users how the app works.

The service that first went public in 2012, first started as a text based service after which the co-founders Iqram Magdon-Ismail and Andrew Kortina thought of making Venmo social.
They made it so that users can sign up for Venmo using their already existing Facebook accounts instead of creating new ones. Building around this social side of Venmo is the Trust feature which is a way for users to send money straight to their Facebook friends for free.
Venmo uses bank-grade security so for any hacker thinking of stealing from users, it would be as hard as robbing a bank.
The app is fun, simple, and fast – users can hold money in his/her Venmo account, or choose to “cash out” to a synced checking account, with changes reflected overnight. (Forbes)
“Over the next decade our goals are to be accepted like Visa and used like Facebook,” said Magdon-Ismail.
Venmo has also been integrated into many mobile applications like taxi hailing app Uber among others but still manages to be free.
In August of 2012, five months after launching publicly, Venmo was acquired for $26.2 million by Braintree, the system that handles payments for companies such as Uber, Airbnb and LivingSocial. Braintree processes over $8 billion in payments annually, with more than $2 billion of that on mobile. Venmo won’t share the size of their slice, but the app’s user figures are growing at a 15% rate every month. (Forbes)
Venmo now plans to monetize through its API Platform, which allows developers to send and share messages along with money. It’s hoping to lead a new form of advertising by providing the genuine social interactions brands are so desperate to tap into.