Making Venmo’s One Touch Mobile Payments Available for Card Issuers

A few months ago, we launched Venmo Touch and enabled one touch purchasing across mobile apps. Venmo Touch was a radically different solution to the problem of managing and using your payment cards online.  Most of the industry has been worrying about digitizing in-store purchases. Instead, we chose to focus our efforts on making mobile e-commerce frictionless, since this is the largest pain point for mobile commerce. With Venmo Touch, merchants don’t have to disrupt their purchase flow with a heavy download or separate sign-up process --- users can opt-in seamlessly as part of the existing purchase flow. Users also don’t need to create yet another userid and password to manage, or more likely forget. Instead, we authenticate users based on information from the mobile device itself given the mobile device has much better information than the decades-old magnetic stripes on the backs of credit cards.

After only a couple months of general availability, Venmo Touch is now on millions of mobile devices and we’ve had fantastic feedback from consumers and merchants that love the one touch purchasing experience. In fact, the number one request we’ve received is to make Venmo Touch available to more constituents in the ecosystem.

The most interesting of these requests have come from major card issuers. While we set out to solve the friction problem for merchants and their mobile customers, it turns out that we also solved a significant pain point for card issuers. Just like e-commerce companies, banks are seeing their customers move rapidly to mobile devices. With 30 to 40% of e-commerce shopping sessions now coming from mobile devices, issuers have struggled with how to make their cards easy to use in a world without keyboards or physical wallets. Essentially the banks’ incentives are exactly aligned with merchants and consumers: reducing friction is good for everyone.

With that in mind, we are now making Venmo Touch available for banks and card issuers. From within participating mobile banking apps, bank customers will be able to opt to use that bank’s card for one touch, mobile purchasing via Venmo Touch -- without any separate sign-up or download.

We’ve collaborated with Simple, a leader in next-generation, mobile banking, as our launch partner for Venmo Touch in the banking space. While we expect this to be the first of many collaborations, combining the great mobile banking experience of Simple with the seamless mobile purchasing of Venmo Touch provides a glimpse into the way we believe people will expect all of their banking and purchasing experiences to work in a post-PC, mobile world.

If you’d like to learn more about the product, visit touch.venmo.com.  I’d love to hear any feedback you have on the product (t: @williamready).  We believe an entirely different set of payment tools are needed for mobile and we’ve only just begun to build.

 

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Bill Ready Bill is the SVP, Global Head of Merchant and Next-Gen Commerce at PayPal. Previously, Ready was the CEO of Braintree, leading the company through the 2013 acquisition by PayPal for $800 million. More posts by this author

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