Big Banks Are Taking Aim at PayPal's Venmo

PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ: PYPL) has been a huge winner in the growth of mobile commerce. Since 2012, PayPal's revenue has more than doubled, and total payment volume (TPV) has consistently grown more than 20% per year. One of PayPal's most valuable assets is Venmo -- a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment app that is very popular with millennials. Venmo's TPV grew more than 100% to about $30 billion over the trailing-12-month period as of the third quarter of 2017.

These numbers understandably make banks feel uneasy. After all, PayPal's mission as a business is to democratize the flow of money, which implies that traditional banking hasn't been very customer-friendly. At the same time, every major bank and credit card company has been forced to partner with PayPal because of its growing 200 million-plus customer base.

While major financial institutions appear to be friendly with PayPal, behind the scenes big banks and credit card companies have linked arms to create their own version of Venmo called Zelle, and it's already surpassed Venmo in TPV.

Source: Fool.com