PayPal & Venmo Are Finally Offering Instant Pay Transfers, Within Minutes

For $0.25 per transaction, PayPal will soon be allowing you to transfer money through their app that will get delivered within seconds rather than days.

The plan was announced this morning, and it comes just after Apple's new Apple Pay features and big bank's move into the peer-to-peer payments business with Zelle.

What all of these competitors had in common that PayPal — and by extension, Venmo — did not were instant transactions. Once a user paid another user money, it would typically take days for it to appear in their app. Their competitors took advantage of this weakness by quickly beginning to offer instant transactions as a way to combat PayPal who had previously been dominating the industry.

Paypal, and PayPal's Venmo division, are now partnering with their once competitors Visa and MasterCard to create this platform. Only those with cards from Visa and MasterCard may access this feature. This comes off of PayPal's recent announcement that they are partnering with Visa and MasterCard to help "Paypal better establish itself as a checkout option at point-of-sale", according to TechCrunch. The partnership allowed users to instantly cash out their funds from their accounts with neither company paying the digital wallet operator fee.

PayPal's deal especially helps out those who are looking to make larger transactions. Each transaction, no matter the size, is only $0.25 with PayPal or Venmo. But at competitors like Square Cash, there is a 1% fee off of each transaction, meaning larger ones might have users paying much more.

PayPal COO, Bill Ready, spoke about what he believes PayPal has to offer over competitors:

What our customers value is that they know that not only can they use us as a pay anyone service, so —no matter what bank someone banks with or what operating system they're on — they can easily exchange money with the person on the other end. But along with ubiquity that PayPal provides, we're offering great protections - the buyer and seller protections are things that have been differentiated in the market for years.

— Bill Ready, PayPal COO

Despite competitors like Zelle having cheaper prices for instant transactions, PayPal still has the advantage as their app is concrete and solid in a way that Zelle's is not. Additionally, they already offer the in-iMessage payment feature that iOS 11 is to have. They're also the company everyone knows and trusts for their peer-to-peer payments. "Venmo" is the common terminology for those sort of transactions, I certainly say "Venmo me" when asking someone to send me money. It'll be hard for any competitor to compete with that kind of recognition.

On their competitors, Lead Manager of Global Consumer Product Communications, Juliet Niczewicz, said in an exclusive with Gadget Hacks:

PayPal has been leading the peer-to-peer payments charge for nearly two decades. We have multiple services to make sending and requesting money easy, including PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom, which work across multiple devices, operating systems, and financial institutions. What gives customers value with PayPal is that you can send money to anyone no matter what bank someone has or what operating system they are on. The instant transfer to bank service is another feature we will now offer to provide more choice in how our customers manage and move their money.

— Juliet Niczewicz, Lead Manager, Global Consumer Product Communications

She also remarked about how PayPal is already looking to expand to more networks:

Now we are taking this ubiquity and enabling P2P payments with PayPal and Venmo in more places and in more contexts — where people are connecting online and on mobile — such as through a voice command with Siri, in chat with iMessage and Slack, in email via Microsoft's Outlook.com and facilitating commerce in Facebook Messenger.

— Juliet Niczewicz, Lead Manager, Global Consumer Product Communications

The payment companies say that the feature is available on the PayPal app in beta for select users, but will roll out for the majority with Visa and MasterCards in the coming months.