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Venmo is offering users an physical debit card
- ARCarr 9y agoBut why a ball of dough?
- tazard 9y agoBecause you knead it
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- striking 9y agoProbably something to do with "dough" being a metonym for money? Really contrived and silly, though. They could've just made it monochromatic with a huge Venmo logo on it.
- schnevets 9y agoSame reason for the "Lucas" subway ads from a few years ago. Weirdness goes viral.
- mewfree 9y agoMaybe because it's an homonym to John Doe. Sounds like a programmer joke to me. Some kind of "image placeholder".
- samfriedman 9y agoI don't get the use of a physical Venmo card. I solely use the app to split bills with my friends, and almost always cash out as soon as I'm paid up. And that's not a knock against the app: I think it's one of the most useful I've experienced. It seems like this would just give me a debit card for a service which is already linked to my real debit card. Is this targeted at those who don't have existing lines of credit/debit and want to use Venmo? What am I missing here?
- o_____________o 9y agoOne angle could be "underbanked" users. Credit card to load funds, withdraw with Venmo card. They could also relax the registration requirements to just having some form of ID.
- Woofles 9y agoI think you aren't in the normal use case. I know a lot of people that keep money in Venmo because it's now "Venmo money". It's easier for people to categorize money that way and feel like it's separate from their bank account when it's in Venmo. I imagine they want to replace your bank account like Paypal has tried to. Then again, Paypal also has a debit card, so this is probably a natural progression for a child of Paypal.
- burkaman 9y agoIt's slightly more frictionless because you don't have to wait for the money to transfer. Might also be useful for psychological budgeting purposes. You pay for dinner with your Venmo card, your friends pay you back in the app, you know the whole time that you're just spending your entertainment money, not your rent money.
- samfriedman 9y agoTrue, this is much more "instant" and definitely has a psychological effect of only working with the separate Venmo money you've accrued. I think the next frontier of these bill-share/social payment apps will be in tighter, seamless bill-share integration. A store where I can easily split the payment between a few people at checkout, or a restaurant that has the Venmo addresses of everyone in my party at the time of the reservation. No need to photograph receipts and split after the fact.
- burkaman 9y agoI think that already exists. https://venmo.com/business https://venmo.com/business https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532327-Splitting-Sharing-Purchases https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532327-Splitting... I've never seen it in the wild though.
- Larrikin 9y agoWith Zelle finally rolling out properly to the big banks, I've started slowly converting friends and family away from Venmo. No need to have money flowing through PayPal and unnecessarily risk it being frozen for arbitrary reasons.
- ibrahima 9y agoI wish they had a better app experience. For me, it's a pain to sign into the Wells Fargo app (partly because I have enabled SMS authentication) just to transfer money to someone for lunch - and once you're in the Wells Fargo app, the Zelle functionality is not that obviously labeled. I wish they had just made a "Zelle" app that stays signed in for payments less than some threshold, and syncs your contact lists, etc. I too would love to kick out the middleman if possible but you have to make it easy enough for average users to use, and right now that's not the case. (I still have yet to actually use Zelle, because I don't know anyone who uses it, but I've tried going through the workflow a few times)
- kentosi 9y agoLast I checked Zelle didn't allow you to link to a credit card. Is this still the case?
- Larrikin 9y agoThey're supposed to be releasing an app sometime this week, but all the literature I read makes Zelle out to be a connection between bank accounts with debit cards being a work around. If credit cards were allowed, like on Venmo, I assume there would be a fee involved to prevent point churning. If that is the case why would you want to link a credit card? Is there any payment service like Zelle or Venmo that allows credit cards without a fee?
- yazaddaruvala 9y agoThat would not be possible. Credit card companies enforce this fee, i.e. Venmo has no choice. Meanwhile, most credit cards give points on dollars spent. If the fees are waived, you and a friend can make a lot of free points. Basically crazy arbitrage would ensue and the program would be ended instantly.
- brosky117 9y agoI tend to leave a pretty decent amount of money in my Venmo account. I consider it my "play" money. Usually, I have my buddy use his reward credit card and I Venmo my part of the bill (mutually beneficial). Having a card would make things a lot simpler for me.
- ultimoo 9y agoInteresting, do you then always forfeit the credit card rewards to your friend? Everyone's situation is different but usually credit card points can be quiet valuable coming in at 3% to 5% of the swiped amount. (For example, $1000 spent on wining and dining over a month can equal approximately $20 to $50, depending on how you spend your reward points).
- brosky117 9y agoYup. That's the trade I guess :)
- astura 9y agoI wouldn't personally do this because Venmo isn't a bank and that money is not FDIC insured.
- colinsidoti 9y agoIf this card could be funded by my points-generating credit card - with no extra cost - I would be very happy.
- kentosi 9y agoVery unlikely. Credit card companies charge fees, which is why such apps (venmo, cash-me, etc) all just push that fee onto you. Usually 3%.
- colinsidoti 9y agoI believe the 3% could still be shouldered by the business, if I'm swiping with them. Venmo would just be sitting in the middle of the transaction so they can prompt me to charge my friends. I think this is possible with Marqeta today: www.marqeta.com
- asidiali 9y agoSimilarly, Square's Cash app has had quite a sleek physical debit card offering for some time now. https://cash.me https://cash.me
- Splendor 9y agoThat's referenced in the first sentence of the article.
- asidiali 9y agoNoted, thanks. I'm just reiterating the fact that it's been available for quite some time and IMO the experience with their app and card is well executed. I much prefer it to Venmo.
- nunez 9y agoAnd it looks WAY better than Venmo's card. Black. Signature. Nothing else.
- chromakode 9y agoI love these cards (Google Wallet used to have one, Square Cash now offers one too) for a different reason from possibly intended: they're a great fallback in case you want to make a purchase where contactless phone payment isn't supported but plastic is. I keep one in my running armband with my phone in case of emergencies and it never leaves the band. That way I never forget it, and if I were to lose it somewhere, I'd still have all of my regular credit cards.
- BHSPitMonkey 9y agoWhat makes that different from a normal credit card? From a consumer protection standpoint you're probably better protected against theft/loss with a credit card than with these specialized debit cards, so I'm not sure I see the advantage.
- jrowley 9y agoThe advantage is connivance - if I could just get 2 of my regular visa card I'd do that but OPs idea is great. Additionally loss can be controlled, since you can easily control your venmo balance as opposed to a traditional debt card.
- Swizec 9y ago> Additionally loss can be controlled, since you can easily control your venmo balance as opposed to a traditional debt card. I dunno dude, I find no difficulty in keeping my debit card empty. Almost too easy in fact. Paycheck comes in, automatic transfers instantly cut it up and put money where it belongs.
- jrowley 9y agoI really need to start doing this. Are you investing it or simply moving it into another account? I've got a silly amount of cash right now, just doing nothing.
- 9y ago
- kenneth 9y agoAm I the only one who refuses to use Venmo? When I need to pay friends casually, I use Facebook Messenger, Square Cash, or even PayPal (which is really easy in Slack with the `/paypal` command these days). I have no interest in using an app that by default broadcasts my transactions to everyone, and that makes it a pain to get money out of its non-FDIC insured closed system. With Facebook or Square, the money gets pushed and pulled directly to my bank account, simply by adding a debit card. Plus, when I did try to sign up once a long time ago… it had the audacity of asking for my SSN. I flat-out refused and refused to use Venmo ever since.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoPaypal is awful. It's not to be trusted under any circumstances. They often reverse your transactions and lock your account for any reason, or no reason. A friend of mine offered a student some programming help. They used Paypal to pay. The student decided they didn't want to pay and told Paypal it was a fraudulent charge. Now my friend doesn't have the money and a strike against their account. (They contested that the charge was valid, but Paypal didn't care.) BTC sadly is up to $3 in transaction fees, so it's not too lightweight at this point.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoBitcoin Cash is a fork of BTC with large blocks, which increases capacity and therefore reduces fees. They're about US$0.01 right now.
- dmm 9y agoI recently had two < $.50 fee BTC transactions quickly verified. Segwit, among other things, is a block increase and enables the lightning network which will allow fast, cheap transfers.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoWorth noting that the Lightning network is off-chain. Whether you care about that or not is up to you.
- blkhp19 9y ago"an physical debit card" ? I swear I see this mistake so often it makes me question whether I actually understand when to use "an"...
- wrigby 9y agoThe actual headline is 'Venmo is offering users an (ugly) physical debit card,' so the '(ugly)' part complicates this. From a quick search, it seems like 'an' is correct here, because the '(ugly)' part isn't an independent clause... or something like that.
- NoodleIncident 9y ago"a" vs "an" is solely a matter of pronunciation; you go off of the next word no matter what it is.
- wrigby 9y agoThat's what I had assumed, but this grammar StackExchange[1] answer seemed to specify that there are exceptions. Admittedly, I didn't read the articles he linked. 1: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/115200 https://english.stackexchange.com/a/115200
- umanwizard 9y ago> I need an (well, if I need anything at all) idiom. This is not an English sentence. No native English speaker would produce this (regardless of a/an)
- SilasX 9y agoThat's always tricky to do, since you want the parenthetical to be optional -- the sentence should work even if you remove it totally. So I personally would have done "... offering users a(n ugly) physical debit card", but I concede that can look pedantic at best and confusing at worst.
- sparky_z 9y ago
- mixmastamyk 9y agoThese services exist only because the US banking system is still mostly stuck in the seventies. During a contract in New Zealand we'd send .25 to pay for a cookie or several thousand for an apartment deposit without blinking an eye, took a few clicks, free. How? The banks talk to each other ((boggle)).
- alkonaut 9y agoDo all these new wallet players allow paying between each other? so if you split a bill, one can have Venmo and one can have some other app/service/wallet?
- DeonPenny 9y agoI like how they are keeping the ugly design theme going
- mrbill 9y agoThis is not any different from the Paypal Debit card that Paypal (owner of Venmo) offers, no? BTW, Paypal now offers almost-instant transfers to a debit card account for a 25c fee (I think it was). I did one of these over the weekend and it was done almost faster than I could log into my bank account and check.
- fasdfdsafas 9y agoAn physical debit card? Sounds intense.
- dheera 9y agoWhat's the point of this? I remember Google doing something similar with Android Pay and a physical Google Wallet card and it was equally useless. I use physical cards only because of the 2-5% cashback. If they don't offer the same levels of cashback as the Chase/Amazon/etc. plastic cards do, I see zero point in having a Venmo debit card. I use Venmo only because I need to send money to friends. For that, a physical card is not necessary.
- dabernathy89 9y agoI'm still bitter that they killed off their API. They were basically the only popular individual-to-individual payments system with a public API (now there are none). So many cool apps could have been built with it, but instead they decided to divert their resources to their API for vendor payments (which, of course, is _not_ why people use Venmo).