Braintree-owned Venmo is expanding its one-touch mobile payments platform Venmo Touch today, with a private beta release of Venmo Touch for Android arriving now, alongside the launch of an iOS 7-compatible version of Venmo Touch and the Braintree iOS SDK. This marks the first time the service has been made available on non-iOS devices, since its launch earlier this year.
Venmo, which payment processor Braintree acquired for $26.2 million in 2012, had previously been known best for its social payments mobile app, which allows users to send their friends money – handy for quick loans, or when splitting a bill at restaurant, for example. But at the beginning of the year, Braintree announced an additional direction for the company with the debut Venmo Touch, essentially a payments layer for mobile applications.
The idea with Touch is that users can save their credit card details within one Touch-enabled application, and then that data is made available in any other app supporting the service, with no need for you to re-enter personal details. Instead, you can then just tap “use card” to pay with the credit card you have on file.
The service competes with Google Wallet and PayPal, but is mainly focused on mobile applications, and not the broader web.
Early adopters for Touch have included HotelTonight, TaskRabbit, and Wrapp, and of course, Venmo itself. Fueled by Touch adoption, Braintree touted in April it had saved some 40 million user credit cards, and had doubled the volume of mobile payment transactions to $2 billion. Recently, Venmo partnered with online banking platform Simple, and began making the service available to banks and other card issuers, in addition to app developers.
Today, the company says that its Android beta and iOS releases incorporate much of the feedback it has received from partners, and other enhancements. On iOS 7 in particular, this includes several usability improvements to make the actual checkout process even quicker for end users.
The updated developer documentation, and accompanying downloads will be available on touch.venmo.com shortly.
