Venmo to Take On Apple Pay and Android Pay With In-App Purchases

PayPal is expanding the ways people can use its popular money-transfer service Venmo by allowing some users to make purchases in other apps using their Venmo account, the company said in its earnings release on Wednesday.

The new service is currently a pilot test that is open to some users making purchases within the sports ticket app Gametime and meal-delivery app Munchery. PayPal said the feature will be launched widely to more users and in more apps later this year. Braintree, another PayPal-owned business, processes payments on behalf of many popular apps, paving the way for more integrations for Pay With Venmo. The announcement confirms a report on Quartz from Tuesday.

The new service will pit Venmo against Apple Pay and Android Pay — all services that want to make it easier to buy stuff within apps by using already stored payment information while removing the need for a shopper to enter credit card information. PayPal’s One Touch button also competes in the space, but the Venmo brand is much more popular among millennials.

Venmo processed $2.5 billion of payments in the fourth quarter, up 174 percent year over year. Overall, PayPal posted earnings of 36 cents a share in the fourth quarter on revenue of $2.6 billion, beating analyst expectations on both.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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