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Comment by broknbottle | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Venmo is such a popular app. I've always used Square Cash and just recently tried Venmo for the first time. My sister and I had dinner and she offered to split the tab. She refused to try Square Cash and had me download Venmo. On the iPhone it felt like buggy port with some weird social feature that allows users to see public transaction.

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Venmo significantly predates Square Cash, and once you get used to using a particular app for a task switching is a burden, especially for something like this with a powerful network effect.

As far as I remember, Paypal significantly predates Venmo. What happened there?

Venmo got its initial traction through college students. I doubt most college students had a paypal account to begin with.

The Paypal app was late, and didn't really support the seamless Venmo experience, because initially Venmo allowed you to sign up with a CC and ate the fees. Later, with enough momentum and usage, they moved people to direct deposit by adding the CC fee and giving some other incentives.

The company was acquired, along with BrainTree, by Paypal to bolster their mobile and API-driven payments in the present age.

Venmo is more social than PayPal, and the brand is cooler. Given PayPal own Venmo I think they realize the value of this.

Paypal was late, inconvenient, and (probably most damning) the brand became closely associated with scary things in the minds of many - freezing accounts, not giving funds to their perceived "rightful" owners, general legal troubles that cast doubt on whether you'd get your money.

It didn't really matter that those mostly happened to people moving 5-6 figures, most of the millenials I know actively avoid paypal as a result.

I've never even heard of Square Cash before and I don't know anyone who uses it. "Sending money for free" is a very simple story, so whichever app is most widely installed wins. I already have and use Venmo and Google Wallet regularly; I'm not installing a third. Too many things to keep track of.

This is only the case if you were very late to p2p transactions. Venmo was well embedded in my social circles by the time there was any competition (with the possible exception of Google wallet. With something so utility-oriented, why go out of your way to rebuild an entire network?

You may as well ask why anyone uses Facebook when Google+ had better features on launch (like post visibility granularity).

But it's a US thing, right ? Here in Belgium/Europe I can take out my smartphone, open my bank app, input my friend's account number and send him money right away (35 years ago you had to do it by paper, 25 years ago there were computers in the bank and now it's on the phone/tablet/web browser). Of course it's really going from one bank to the other so it's not p2p but the UX is as smooth.

Yeah. Even in the UK - which is behind much of continental Europe in terms of banking - you can send money to anyone's bank account immediately and for free given their account number. Neither of these things are true in the US (at least going via the bank, hence why Venmo / Square Cash / etc exist).

In North America, given a bank account number, you can pull money from it (this is how cheques work over there).

In Europe, given a bank account number, you can put money into it (this is how "giros" work).

This fundamental difference in banking system has caused endless pain for the US and its hyperlocal banking system. Canada overcame this by having a home grown debit card system expand into online payments.

I also don't get it. Google Wallet has been around for ages and couldn't be any simpler or easier. These kids obviously haven't been burned by PayPal yet.

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