In many ways, Venmo is the MySpace of P2P payment fintech. In a time when the cowed American consumer had all but surrendered to an existence of wiring money to someone requiring a trip to the bank (or Western Union) and/or multiple days of thumb twiddling while the banks did God-knows-what behind the scenes, a little company came out of the blue with a miraculous solution. Venmo’s pitch to the public wasn’t just “hey, you can just do that instantly from your smartphone now.” They sweetened the deal with a social element, adding “you can even post your transactions with friends like you’re on Facebook, that social media site we all love and will use forever.”
Paraphrasing aside, the app drop was nothing short of a revelation. Soon, people everywhere were publicly sending money around with reckless abandon—splitting $10 dining bills, repaying dire emergency loans, and announcing their illegal drug purchases with coy emojis in the transaction memo lines for all the world to see. Today, people are still using Venmo more or less the same way. But in a time of increased public awareness and concern about data privacy, the app’s default setting to make all these transactions public by default has come under ever-increasing scrutiny.
Earlier this week, a decade-and-change and one PayPal acquisition after launch, Venmo finally announced a big redesign of the app that seemingly takes those concerns to heart. New users to the platform will now get prompted to decide whether they’d like to share their financial decisions with the world as part of the onboarding process. Users will also be able to select whether they want the business they’re choosing to share to be seen by their friends list or the whole wide world. As Venmo’s SVP and GM Alex Sowa told The Verge, this change is an effort to help users “actually have trust in the Venmo experience.”
While this overture might not be fully relegated to “too little, too late” territory, it comes at a time when countless other fintech services offer alternative P2P solutions. The refresh also comes in the long wake of myriad headline-grabbing controversies that emerged courtesy of the app’s default public transaction setting.
Venmo’s negative press era began with reports of hackers finessing money via cloned accounts and social engineering—a fairly commonplace issue for any digital space where money is exchanged. But when some savvy reporters figured out Venmo was an open door into the private lives of public figures with otherwise battened-down hatches, it was suddenly a wellspring of political scandal leads.
Public Venmo transactions exposed Joe Biden’s secret account, a security advisor to the NSA who didn’t make his friends list private, and SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas’s aide accepting curious donations from lawyers with cases on the docket. They revealed a newly minted VP candidate, J.D. Vance, was still carousing with his Yale Law chums while publicly railing against “the elites.” Venmo transactions were even at the center of a Congressional ethics hearing when they indicated Representative Matt Gaetz was paying for sex and “party favors” through the app.
Whether you’re one of the most powerful political figures in the world or just someone whose bank doesn’t use Zelle, we can surely all agree that these changes are long overdue. As the redesign rolls out over the coming week, perhaps Venmo will finally become the utopian space described by executive Alex Sowa, “where you split a bill after a real-life shared experience happened.”
That’ll be the day.
Leave a comment