July’s PayPal earnings call talked quite a bit more about Visa than Venmo, but while the consequences of the Visa deal are still unknown, Venmo’s numbers are already known, and they look great.
Specifically, Venmo processed $4 billion in transactions in Q2, compared with $3.2 billion the quarter previous. This is 25% growth on the quarter, and 140% growth on the year.
Compare this with QuickPay, the peer-to-peer payments service from JPMorgan Chase, part of the clearXChange realtime network, which also includes U.S. Bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Capital One. QuickPay processed $20 billion in 2015, and is growing 40% year over year.
If Chase’s numbers continue to climb at the same rate, it should reach $28 billion in 2016. If Venmo’s growth continues at current rates, it should reach $18.25 billion. But where Venmo particularly shines is in its user numbers. Ron Shevlin calculated the average Venmo transaction size at $2, which seems low, but certainly indicates more activity than Chase QuickPay, which reports an average transaction size of $300.
The Chase number indicates about 93 million QuickPay transactions, while Shevlin’s Venmo number implies 9 billion transactions. (PayPal reported just 1.4 billion mobile transactions this quarter, which may indicate Venmo users are not accurately reporting usage.) These numbers may not be reliable, but indicate bank P2P and Venmo are operating very differently. Venmo probably already has more users than the nation’s largest bank. PayPal counts more than 188 million active users, while JPMorgan Chase counts more than 20 million active mobile users.
Venmo is also expanding its Pay with Venmo service, and added a number of merchants and expanded the pilot class, according to CEO Dan Schulman on the earnings call.