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Comment by samfriedman | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the use of a physical Venmo card. I solely use the app to split bills with my friends, and almost always cash out as soon as I'm paid up. And that's not a knock against the app: I think it's one of the most useful I've experienced.

It seems like this would just give me a debit card for a service which is already linked to my real debit card. Is this targeted at those who don't have existing lines of credit/debit and want to use Venmo? What am I missing here?

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It's slightly more frictionless because you don't have to wait for the money to transfer. Might also be useful for psychological budgeting purposes. You pay for dinner with your Venmo card, your friends pay you back in the app, you know the whole time that you're just spending your entertainment money, not your rent money.

True, this is much more "instant" and definitely has a psychological effect of only working with the separate Venmo money you've accrued.

I think the next frontier of these bill-share/social payment apps will be in tighter, seamless bill-share integration. A store where I can easily split the payment between a few people at checkout, or a restaurant that has the Venmo addresses of everyone in my party at the time of the reservation. No need to photograph receipts and split after the fact.

I think that already exists.

https://venmo.com/business

https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532327-Splitting...

I've never seen it in the wild though.

The only thing you are missing is that this isn't about the users, it is about Venmo. They can a higher percentage from the transaction than they would as interest in their main account. This is the same reason that all banks rushed to do debit cards you could use as Visa etc. They are getting the fees instead of AmEx or Discover.

One angle could be "underbanked" users. Credit card to load funds, withdraw with Venmo card. They could also relax the registration requirements to just having some form of ID.

Venmo, like many of these services, earns income in transaction fees and on interest on the float. It makes all the sense in the world from the business side to encourage users to treat Venmo like a proper bank account.

From the user side, it's interesting because it would allow one to spend money directly from the Venmo account without having a bank account at all. Not sure who operates that way, but if it's even 1% of their users that might be 100K people or so.

I think you aren't in the normal use case. I know a lot of people that keep money in Venmo because it's now "Venmo money". It's easier for people to categorize money that way and feel like it's separate from their bank account when it's in Venmo. I imagine they want to replace your bank account like Paypal has tried to.

Then again, Paypal also has a debit card, so this is probably a natural progression for a child of Paypal.

I see advantage for some who may want immediate access to funds. But, from a company like Venmo, I wish they would resisted the urge to offer a physical payment option and find/create a digital solution.

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