The amount of money flowing through Venmo has surged — at least before the launch of Apple's rival service (PYPL)

pulse

December 7, 2017 12:29 AM

Customers sent $9 billion through PayPal's mobile person-to-person payment service in the third quarter. That's up six times since the first quarter of 2015.

Venmo has become so popular, its name has become a verb in the same way "Google" has. People use the the PayPal-owned mobile person-to-person payment service to pay rent, split bar tabs, and hold fundraisers. It's become a must-have app for millennials, and as we can see in this chart from Statista, the amount of money sent through it has soared since 2015.

But Venmo's time in the sun might soon come to an end. On Monday, Apple finally launched Apple Pay Cash, its own person-to-person payment system. Apple Pay Cash allows people with Apple devices to send cash to each other via Apple's Messages app.

Unlike Venmo and other payment apps, Apple Pay Cash doesn't work on Android devices. But Apple has the huge advantage of already having millions of people who use Messages and who also have already stored their credit and debit cards on their iPhones. And while Messages and Apple Pay Cash are built into the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system, consumers have to download Venmo separately.

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