Venmo and Uber have struck a partnership that'll allow Uber riders to pay for their trips using Venmo, PayPal's easy and increasingly popular mobile payments service.
Uber already allows users to pay with their PayPal balance, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Venmo is also coming to the ride-hailing service as an alternative payment option. The feature works with both Uber rides and Uber Eats, and the payment procedure is handled directly inside the Uber app. That is unless splitting the fare with friends, at which point they will have to open the Venmo app.
Venmo Will Become An Official Payment Method Inside Uber
The decision to allow Venmo payments on Uber was an easy one.
"There have been 6 million transactions inside of Venmo in the last year alone that were discussing Uber," according to Venmo COO Bill Ready, in an interview with Bloomberg. Enabling Venmo should make it less of a hassle for people to pay for their rides. Granted, Uber has offered Apple Pay as a payment option since 2016, but the company says that still only accounts for a small pool of users.
"It is limited obviously to the devices that have Apple Pay, and then not all of those people use it," according to Marco Mahrus, Uber's financial partnerships and programs head. "Apple Pay is definitely not the lion's share of payments on Uber."
How To Use Venmo To Pay For Uber Rides
The integration won't go live until in the coming weeks, but Venmo will appear as an payment option inside Uber. Once selected, it will redirect the user to the Venmo app if they want to split it with friends. Otherwise, everything is facilitated inside Uber, as mentioned.
The move comes as the race over mobile payments is heating up. Just last month PayPal and Venmo announced that it was going to let users have a physical debit card that would work in any store that accepts credit cards. Google, meanwhile, said this week that it was adding a peer-to-peer payments sending feature, a core Venmo service that's also the main draw of Zella, another mobile payments app created by major banks.
Are you a frequent Venmo user? What are your thoughts on Uber finally making it an official payment option for regular rides and Uber Eats deliveries? As always, if you have anything to share, feel free to sound them off in the comments section below!
