Hot on the heels of the US Federal Reserve’s real-time payment and settlement system announcement, Venmo has launched a feature that supports instant transfers to US bank accounts.
According to TechCrunch, this new feature available on the PayPal-owned payments app will speed up their standard bank transfer service, which takes one to three business days to process transactions. Instant Transfer reduces this time to minutes.
In fact, Venmo has offered instant transfers to eligible Visa and Mastercard debit cards since January 2018 for a small fee. Over the years, the fee has changed from a flat $0.25 to 1% of the transferred amount and now stands at a minimum fee of $0.25 and a maximum of $10.
Standard transfers are still available for those who do not want to pay for the instant transfer service.
This news follows increased competition from Square’s Cash App and bank-operated challenger Zelle, but Venmo retain more than 40 million active accounts - more users than some of the US’s bigger banks, according to TechCrunch.