Venmo is offering users an physical debit card | Hacker News Reader

Venmo is offering users an physical debit card

techcrunch.com

97 pointsjanober119 comments

Am 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.

Paypal 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.

Bitcoin Cash is a fork of BTC with large blocks, which increases capacity and therefore reduces fees. They're about US$0.01 right now.

I 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.

Worth noting that the Lightning network is off-chain. Whether you care about that or not is up to you.

Use Litecoin or Ethereum instead. Both are more secure, more stable and faster.

Yeah litecoin doesn't get mentionned nearly enough but this sort of thing is it's raison d'être!

Btc has grown to fill the large tx space but there are trustworthy coins designed for smaller, cheaper interpersonal txs.

Don't use etherium for interpersonal because thet're not aiming for this use case long term. They want to be an underlying platform where ltc/doge were explicitely designed to settle small debts with friends or tip cam strippers. You don't have touse it on those strippers but if it's good enough for them, you should take a look.

Bitcoin Cash has support from the best mining farms money can buy, it will be hard to compete with the transaction price for the foreseeable future

PayPal is not very trustworthy, I agree. I use it as a last resort, and cash out any deposits of over $50 immediately. Facebook and Square are my preferred methods. But when I have to deal with people who have Venmo, but have never heard of Square and Facebook Messenger Payments… PayPal is usually a decent middle ground. It's pretty ubiquitous.

For what it's worth, PayPal owns Venmo and has so for quite a while.

Transactions are like 10 cents right now with SegWit I think

I don't really understand this comment. There's nothing stopping the student from doing the same thing with Vemno (especially since Venmo is owned by PayPal), and that sort of thing has happened many times before[1][2]. Venmo also has a strict "no business/commercial activities using personal accounts" policy.[3]

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/venm...

[2] http://gizmodo.com/reminder-venmo-wont-protect-you-from-scam...

[3] http://jolt.richmond.edu/2016/10/21/ignoring-the-venmo-user-...

The buyer in Venmo has pretty much no recourse whereas in PayPal it's pretty much the opposite… likely something to do with their early relationship with eBay.

So? The GP's complained his or her friend got scammed through PayPal as the "seller" (of services), not the "buyer." My point is Venmo would not have have protected the friend from this scam and, in fact, it would have been 10 times easier to pull off the scam because Venmo forbids this sort of buyer/seller commercial transaction with personal accounts. Nobody has any sort of "protection."

The big difference between the two services is PayPal is designed mainly for commercial activities and Venmo is designed for already established friends to more easily chip in for gas.

The friend was very naïve to accept a PayPal payment for a business transaction that wasn't covered by PayPal's Seller Protection while simultaneously expecting PayPal to protect against fraud. PayPal does cover sellers when there are unauthorized (or "unauthorized") charges but it doesn't apply to services, just physical goods (and excludes certain items like gift cards). It's like saying that the post office shouldn't be trusted to deliver greeting cards because a stranger sent you a fake check through the mail.

[I've successfully used PayPal's seller protection for an unauthorized charge and it was a real easy process.]

My comment didn't mention Venmo at all.

The point was to warn people not to use PayPal. It doesn't matter if it was naive when most people would expect PayPal to process a transaction.

You don't need to take my word for it. PayPal has a long and majestic history on HN consisting of hundreds of stories of how terrible PayPal is.

Why didn't your friend go to the student's university and tell them the student was paying people to do his assignments? I bet he would have changed his tune right quick.

Isn't that blackmailing?

I didn't say go to the student and blackmail him. I said go straight to the university.

Worth noting that PayPal owns Venmo...

Am I the only one who hates "Am I the only one" as the start of an argument? It's a disingenuous question, you are never the only one.

"I'm probably going to be downvoted for this, but..." (insert common opinion, receive upvotes)

Am I the only one who hates the frequent overuse/misuse of the word "disingenuous"?

I share your distaste for Venmo, but I've often found it inconvenient to get everyone on Google Wallet or similar. You can actually set your privacy to never allow public posts when sending or receiving money.

Same boat here, I greatly prefer Square Cash (money goes directly between checking accounts so there is no second step to empty your balance), but the network effects of Venmo are too strong at this point. The all-transactions-private setting is easy to turn on.

> money goes directly between checking accounts

Some see this as a disadvantage of Square Cash--they say individual transactions clog their checking account statements, they prefer to withdraw a consolidated amount from their Venmo balance.

You're free to do that these days if you'd like with Square Cash… it lets you build a balance on their system just the way Venmo does. But it's not required and I personally disable that.

I don't like to have random balances on money-transfer startups' system, especially since it's uninsured.

I refuse to use Venmo due to the creepy social aspect. I don't need to know that a friend of a friend just paid for their rent, and I certainly don't want my transactions being broadcast for all the world to see.

yeah that's the part i'm quite confused by. i've used venmo simply because my friend preferred to be paid that way, and then never after that but that social thing always baffled me because i can't imagine people being so willing to share their transactions with the world. i just assumed venmo being european may come from a different culture where perhaps people care less about privacy, but i never bothered to verify if that was the case.

Venmo isn't European, and at least from what I see not all that common here in comparison.

Just toggle the setting to make all transactions private. It's in the settings.

As a Swede I regularly feel we're missing out on a lot of cool stuff only available in North America, but when it comes to pain-free easy payments I think we've got it right with Swish (https://www.getswish.se/). It's free, ubiquitous, instant and all you need is the recipients phone number.

In Australia, the banks all built this into their mobile apps. Just transfer to others using phone number.

I've used it for Commbank -> Commbank payments, and it seemed to work well. How would it work for Commbank -> NAB, where the bank doesn't tie the number to an account?

AFAIK the first time you go from Commbank > Wespac (for example) the recipient receives an SMS instructing them to enter BSB/Acc number in Commbank's site. From then on, Commbank has paired the number to the bank account and it just goes direct from then on.

At least that's my observation. I do it from Commbank > other banks all the time and they don't have to do anything manually each time to receive the money - just a day or so later the money appears in their account.

I use and prefer Venmo. I dislike PayPal. I have not used Square Cash. I would refuse to use FB Messenger if anyone asked (which no one has).

  I have no interest in using an app that by default 
  broadcasts my transactions to everyone

I haven't seen the default in some time, but it's very simple to change the privileges on a transaction (2 clicks, immediately visible on every transaction), which apply to all your future transactions unless you change it back. Cold comfort, but there you go.

  .. it had the audacity of asking for my SSN.

I'm frankly surprised that PayPal doesn't require a SSN for the same activities... or maybe they do. Venmo help[1] indicates they are required to do so for users with certain volumes (several hundred dollars per week) by the U.S. Treasury. Why would Paypal and other vendors not have the same requirements?

[1] https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532197-Social-Se...

Venmo is PayPal.

I've avoided giving PayPal my SSN by verifying a credit card and a bank account with trial deposits and linking them to my account. Otherwise you're limited to something like $300 in withdraws a month. I've had my PayPal account for 16 years though so it might be different now.

Square Cash is really quite the breath of fresh air after having gotten used to the crappy experience offered by Venmo/Paypal. I'm really just rehasing points made elsewhere in the thread, but there's no bullshit public sharing of your payment activities by default, and they allow you to automatically transfer balances directly into your bank account as you receive them. And the website and app are both super simple, reliable, and easy to use and easy on the eyes, unlike the Venmo clients which feels clunky and full of bugs.

I totally recommend giving it a try if you haven't already.

I probably will. I don't use Venmo very much, and when I do, it's to pay (or receive money from) people who also use Venmo. So it's convincing not just myself, but those with whom I transact, to use the same network.

> I have no interest in using an app that by default broadcasts my transactions to everyone.

This. 1 of my boxing trainers was using Venmo since 2016, and he even asked me to pay him through that at that time. So I came home and did some research, and in that process, found some payments that my other trainee friends had made to him, on his facebook wall.

I was like WTF?! Why would anyone broadcast their financial transactions, that too for something like Personal Training.

Moreover, the transactions I saw, for the exact same type of training I was receiving (pad work followed by sparring for 1 hour), was 20% to 40% less than what I was paying, and I felt like I was a sucker. I stopped training with him a few weeks later.

Never used Venmo either.

What? Venmo doesn't show you the payment amount for others' transactions.

I think it used to. It doesn't appear to now.

Correct. It did show amounts in 2016.

>makes it a pain to get money out

A pain? It's by far the most painless of all the payment platforms I've used. I can request a withdrawal at 9am and have it in my account by 1pm. I've never seen that level of service on any other app.

Square Cash has instant withdrawal (and a much nicer design).

That doesn't make Venmo's experience painful. It's like 2 clicks to withdraw. I'm actually curious what OP finds difficult about it because I can't imagine it taking any less effort.

> I have no interest in using an app that by default broadcasts my transactions to everyone

This is such an astounding deal breaker for me. I'm honestly more than a little surprised it's even legal. It just sounds like one of those things that wouldn't be because of course it's a bad idea and everyone agreed on that like 100 years ago or something.

It's configurable in the app's settings. You can change the default to private.

For my friends, the only reason they use Venmo is because the lender can send in the ticket. For any of the ones you mentioned, the sender has to be the one being responsible. People don't like reminding their peers to pay them back via personal communication

Square Cash lets you request money from people, if that's what you mean.

You can send an invoice on PayPal too, though it might seem a little odd to use that feature with your friends, it's very business-y.

> 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.

You can change the default visibility in settings to only you and the person you're sending money too.

Also, your PayPal balance is not FDIC insured either.

I find Venmo a lot easier to use than PayPal and far more people I know are on there vs anything else. I do wish it auto deposited to a bank account like Square Cash though.

What's wrong with a simple wire transfer? Why go through all the trouble to let other entities transfer money when the bank can do so already?

Venmo is commonly used in social settings to reimburse small amounts (e.g. splitting the cost of food ordered for a party).

Wire transfers are generally cost prohibitive, and even assuming no fees, it’d be strange (and more time consuming) to ask a friend for their bank details to wire them $10 for pizza.

Wait, there's fees for transferring money from your bank account in the US?

With ACH transfers, generally not.

When I owe my friends money I either have cash or I just get their bank details and put money into their account. I really don't need a third party to hold money in escrow to then move between people, banks already exist for that and it takes like 2 hours to show up in their account.

Sure an account number + sort code is slightly less easy to input than an email address but it's hardly difficult and after the first time my bank will remember it anyway.

These 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)).

I 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?

One 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.

I 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.

It'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.

True, 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.

I think that already exists.

https://venmo.com/business

https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532327-Splitting...

I've never seen it in the wild though.

I see advantage for some who may want immediate access to funds. But, from a company like Venmo, I wish they would resisted the urge to offer a physical payment option and find/create a digital solution.

The only thing you are missing is that this isn't about the users, it is about Venmo. They can a higher percentage from the transaction than they would as interest in their main account. This is the same reason that all banks rushed to do debit cards you could use as Visa etc. They are getting the fees instead of AmEx or Discover.

Venmo, like many of these services, earns income in transaction fees and on interest on the float. It makes all the sense in the world from the business side to encourage users to treat Venmo like a proper bank account.

From the user side, it's interesting because it would allow one to spend money directly from the Venmo account without having a bank account at all. Not sure who operates that way, but if it's even 1% of their users that might be 100K people or so.

Similarly, Square's Cash app has had quite a sleek physical debit card offering for some time now.

https://cash.me

That's referenced in the first sentence of the article.

Noted, 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.

And it looks WAY better than Venmo's card. Black. Signature. Nothing else.

With 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.

I 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)

Last I checked Zelle didn't allow you to link to a credit card. Is this still the case?

They'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?

That 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.

You're not reading the ToS if you think your bank has less chance to freeze your funds than PayPal/venmo

This 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.

I 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.

What 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.

The 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.

> 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.

I 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.

Atleast for me 10% right off the top of my paycheck immediately gets moved to my Ally account.

It really angered me when I realized how terrible all the big banks are when it comes to the saving account. After moving my money in my savings there, the first couple interest payments ended up being more money than I'd gotten from the entire life of my savings account at Bank of America.

Some goes to a joint checking account GF and I use for rent/groceries/etc. Some goes to a buffer savings account in the bank (for unexpected crap), some goes to Walthfront for longterm savings/investing, some pays off credit card (used for all daytoday expenses due to points), some pays for some debt I got myself into by being bad at taxes, and then a small buffer is left for any fuckups.

> if I could just get 2 of my regular visa card

i don't know about the chip cards but back in the day i used to do this by just calling and saying the stripe wore out, and i need an exact same replacement card.

Did you ask for a spare card? 99% of banks would happily send you one if you ask. My friend always kept a duplicate in the glovebox in the old days.

EDIT: not sure how it works with chip cards. Discover still lets you request for duplicate cards from their website though.

I keep <$50 loaded on it at any time and if I lose it, I can cancel it instantly using the app. My "real" credit cards remain in my wallet.

Lol where do you live that everywhere accepts mobile pay? Some utopia in the sky?

Moscow and other big cities in Russia

It's becoming very common outside the US. I think a large part of it is that credit cards are less common in most other countries, especially among young people. Mobile payments have a big advantage in convenience over cash, which is the primary alternative for many people.

In Canada we've had contactless card readers for a few years now - the mobile payments are compatible with the exact same protocol, so instead of tapping your card you just tap your phone.

I haven't even gotten any funny looks tapping my phone with Android Pay at places not advertising it - even just after it came out in Canada.

Practically everywhere in the UK for example.

Literally every western country that isn't the US.

"an physical debit card" ? I swear I see this mistake so often it makes me question whether I actually understand when to use "an"...

The 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.

"a" vs "an" is solely a matter of pronunciation; you go off of the next word no matter what it is.

That'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

> 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)

That'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.

This type of error creeps in a lot when redrafting sentences. For example, maybe the submitter originally wrote "an actual debit card", then decided that saying "physical" instead would make the distinction clearer. It's very easy to just change the word and forget to check the words around it.

Edit: Or, as wrigby pointed out, they removed the word "(ugly)" from the techcrunch headline.

I don't think a native speaker would ever make this mistake - it sounds incredibly awkward. It's not in the same class as many well-known and common spelling mistakes, like grocer's apostrophe, loosers, and others. This case the poster probably went back to remove the missing word because of the character limit on HN descriptions.

No, you're not crazy, "an ox", "a fox", "an apple", "an physical debit card".

All but the latter roll off the tongue. Must be the same in French with the liaison -- wonder what the equivalent butcherings are ;-)

I'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).

I 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.

Interesting, 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).

Yup. That's the trade I guess :)

I wouldn't personally do this because Venmo isn't a bank and that money is not FDIC insured.

What'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.

I like how they are keeping the ugly design theme going

If this card could be funded by my points-generating credit card - with no extra cost - I would be very happy.

Very unlikely. Credit card companies charge fees, which is why such apps (venmo, cash-me, etc) all just push that fee onto you. Usually 3%.

I 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

But why a ball of dough?

Because you knead it

Probably 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.

Same reason for the "Lucas" subway ads from a few years ago. Weirdness goes viral.

Maybe because it's an homonym to John Doe. Sounds like a programmer joke to me. Some kind of "image placeholder".

Do 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?

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