Category: Mobile Payments

Venmo is finding success among a younger generation

Venmo, a payments firm based in New York, may become the flagship mobile commerce facilitator among millenials. Younger generations are finding physical currency to be bothersome, opting instead to use digital currency and store their financial information online. The massive popularity of mobile technology has begun causing a major shift in the commerce world, and millenials choosing to forsake physical money are at the heart of this shift. Firms like Venmo may stand to benefit from this trend.

Younger generations often cause a shift in technology and society and mobile commerce is coming out on top

This is not the first time that a younger generation of people have caused a major shift in society. Traditional telephone land lines are no longer popular thanks to the growth of smartphones, which received strong support from young consumers. Young people are also abandoning traditional television services, opting instead to get the majority of their entertainment online in some form. Mobile commerce has managed to find a great deal of success in various sectors, and young consumers have helped secure this success.

Venmo processed $314 million during the first quarter of 2014

Venmo has processed some $314 million in mobile payments during the first quarter of this year, a 62% increase in the payments it processed in the prior quarter. The Venmo application has become quite popular with younger consumers, with many of these people using the app to send money to their friends and pay for products online. One thing that sets Venmo apart from its competitors in the mobile commerce field is that there are no fees associated with transferring money through the mobile application.

Some mobile payments firms are finding more success than others

Venmo is not the only mobile payments firm that has found success by engaging younger consumers. There is no singular platform that these consumers favor, however, and they frequently jump from one mobile payments service to the next. This fickle nature has made it difficult for some firms to find lasting success in their competitive market.

Oxygen has now launched its smartphone payments app service that provides users a new way to pay and get paid.

Provider of payment solutions, Oxygen, has now announced the launch of its mobile wallet service, called the Oxygen Wallet, which provides users the ability to transfer money and buy gifts for family and friends with whom they are connected over social networks.

This service can also be used for bill payments, refilling cell phone service accounts, and shopping.

According to the chairman and managing director of Oxygen, Pramod Saxena, “Ours is the country’s first social mobile wallet service through which people can share money with their friends and family over their preferred social networks and messaging platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google+, and Twitter.”

It is expected that the top users of this mobile wallet will be youth when they want to split bills with friends.

The service will give these individuals the chance to send smaller but frequent amounts of money or gifts to their friends. When they head to restaurants and they want to split the bill, they can easily transfer their share of the total to the individual who has covered the whole thing.

Saxena explained that they will be able to use the Oxygen Wallet to be able to pay their bills, to make payments on mobile commerce sites such as when purchasing movie tickets, to pay for pizza orders, to make travel ticket bookings, to pay for movie and music downloads, and to pay for their mobile service charges.

He added that “Oxigen now sees the opportunity to leverage the social connect to India’s 900 million mobile users and 100 million Facebook accounts, where the youth is rapidly adopting social media apps like WhatsApp, Twitter etc.”

The mobile wallet apps is now available on both the Google Play Store and on the Apple Store. According to Saxena, it gives users the ability to be able to send funds to their connections through their favorite social media channels without ever having to actually share any of the information about their own bank account or about the accounts of the recipient.