After first announcing the service last summer, Venmo released an instant transfer feature that lets consumers send money to their debit cards without waiting days for their funds to appear, The Verge reported.
The feature, which costs users $0.25, could help consumers cash out before a holiday or on Sundays — in other words, times that banks usually don’t process transactions.
A feature previously available only for PayPal beta users, Instant Transfer now promises delivery of funds within 30 minutes, even on holidays and weekends. The service will only work with Visa and Mastercard debit cards, however. Users who don’t want to pay the $0.25 can still wait one to three days for their payments to process.
The new service is all part of the master plan that PayPal COO Bill Ready told Karen Webster was unveiled when the Visa and Mastercard partnerships were announced. It was a plan, Ready noted, that marked the beginning of PayPal’s big shift from being perceived as a payments ecosystem adversary to an ecosystem enabler in digital banking and money transfers, leveraging the reach of PayPal online and via mobile pay for the benefit of card issuers and the consumers they serve.
“Over the course of the last year, we haven’t just reframed the way we are working with Visa and Mastercard, but also how we are working with the entire banking ecosystem,” Ready told Webster. “We aspire to be one of the best ways for issuers to engage their customers and drive engagement and revenue for them and for the ecosystem.”
PayPal, by the numbers, is the largest driver of digital transactions on the web for transactions that don’t go through Amazon, with its 200 million active users, checkout on 75 percent of Internet Retailers’ top 100 merchants and 50 million One Touch customers.
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