Over the past several years, large banks have developed mobile payment apps for those with accounts to exchange funds easily amongst one another. In 2009, Venmo was made publicly available and, not long after, the money-transfer app took off due to its convenience and allowance for inter-institutional transfers (members of different banks can transfer money to one another). The app has grown at an incredible rate, handling over $700 million of transactions in the third quarter of 2014 alone. By linking with social media, it has become the go-to way to split a restaurant bill among friends, contribute gas money, etc. and, like Google, has attained the honor of being used colloquially as a verb (i.e. “Venmo me for the bill”).
While Venmo has
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Particularly, there was one Venmo user, Christopher Grey, who can be considered the generalized victim of the app’s security shortfalls. His case was the subject of a Slate.com article (1) that is the origin of all other social media and blog stories criticizing Venmo. The reality of the situation was that “all” of the horror stories mentioned in the previous paragraph are just iterations of the same few users that actually suffered, Christopher Grey likely being the subject of 85%-90% of that mass of articles, posts, and messages. This is a consequence of the developed connective culture that Jose Van Dijck writes about:
“A major change is that through social media, these casual speech acts have turned into formalized inscriptions, which, once embedded in the larger economy of wider publics, take on a different value. Utterances previously expressed offhandedly are now released into a public domain where they can have far-reaching and long-lasting effects.” (2)
This article became “a formalized inscription” upon which the user-controlled media of today based its barrage of public attacks on Venmo.
In my personal life, I’ve experienced the small scale debate about Venmo, having friends of various ages who are reluctant to linking debit card or bank account information to the app arguing about repayment for a Papa John’s delivery with those who adore the convenience of the app. Recently, it has become the subject of national discussion, especially as established
Writing on the Wall by Tom Standage focuses on different forms of social media and how it has changed to benefit society throughout the past 2,000 years. Standage defines social media as a community that is brought together by shared information and passed along to different social connections. Social media may not have been in the same form as we are used to nowadays, but it has been around for centuries. In some ways, you may not realize that daily activities are forms of spreading information. People like the idea of social media because as humans, we like interacting with other people. Throughout the years, we’ve learned how to transition from oral communication to a written language. The discoveries changed how people view communication for the better.
Since the beginning of the Internet, people have become indulged with its many functions, from making advanced programs to learning how to do new projects to social media. Social media has evolved over the years since the late 1990s and, ultimately, people have incorporated it into their lives. It is the modern way for people to connect and communicate with anyone across the globe. Plus, social media is everywhere; people utilize it when they are on the bus, at the checkout line, and even when they are using the restroom. In Peggy Orenstein’s “The Way We Live Now: I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” she propounds that social media has altered society. Social media has changed society’s priorities, characteristics, and mentality.
Venmo provides a non-confrontational method for friends to reimburse and pay one another when more often people do not carry cash. Moreover, if a friend “forgets” or “I have no cash” to pay what s/he owes, you do not have to resort to the awkward, perhaps old-fashioned, step of asking for the money. Venmo’s “request” button will do the job for you, that can be a new social norm. Along with the ease of use comes a significant problem due to a misunderstanding about how Venmo works. Many users could easily think Venmo cash transfers happen instantly when in fact it does not. This is crucial because people appear to be using Venmo to transact business with strangers not just to split dinner checks and rent payments with friends.
The Harvard Business School case study Mobile Banking for the Unbanked explores two very different examples of mobile financial service models:
More and more people before deciding to purchase goods used to check offers via smartphones or tablets. The world 's total number of sales of such devices exceeded the number of desktops.[1] Technological development and high availability of new solutions contributed to the increase in customer expectations to its relations with the bank. The ability to use the money anywhere, anytime in an easy and convenient way for customers has become natural. Mobile payments is big innovation which has some a lot of good coins but it has some threats and limitations about which I will consider and analyze in my literature review.
The current President of the United States, Barack Obama, has been a particularly modern president, using social media in many ways to bolster his political agenda and even setting a few online records along the way1. He utilizes social media to not only seem more modern and knowledgeable of current technology, but as a gateway to reach more people through appeals to his audience’s pathos and ethos. He garners public support and gives out specific information2 through his new, ‘personal’ twitter3, therefore we will focus mostly on that account. In the 21st century, it is incredibly important to understand the close relationship between social media and rhetoric.
5b. PayPal and Venmo capabilities are restricted to the exchange of money only. With Apple Pay, the user doesn’t need to open up or install a new app but instead can pay through their messages with a few simple taps. This is an excellent case of envelopment because Apple Pay is offering multiple functionalities while PayPal and Venmo only offer one. PayPal can partner with companies like Facebook and have users be able to exchange money through the Messenger App or the Facebook app as those apps are already widely used by billions of people.
Since the late nineties, there has been a growing sector of online companies that sell merchandise or other products, known as e-tailers. This growing market, as a result, has driven demand for another type of company that is able to safely and securely process payments and business transactions between buyers and sellers. The growth in the online industry has spurred all types of opportunities for payment service providers like PayPal. There are a variety of competitors that have entered the market, such as Amazon payments and Stripe. However, PayPal has used it’s first-mover advantage and this has allowed them to make their service synonymous with online purchases and payment processing. This brand name and reputation alone has given them the ability to position themselves in the market in order to sustain their business long term. This paper will focus on how the idea of PayPal was developed, grew into a massive e-business with over 179 million active users, and changed the way people pay online.
The last decade has witnessed a lot of growth of mobile communication devices and wireless technologies across the globe. This has led to a change in the way many activities are conducted and opened the way for m-commerce, which is e-commerce's next evolutionary stage. The significant power of m-commerce is primarily as a result of the ability to connect wireless devices anytime, anywhere (The Future of Mobile Payment Systems : Rise of the Mobile Wallet 2012-2017 [Electronic version], 2011).
In January 2014, SmoothPay was first launched in Toronto, Ontario offering mobile payments with integrated functions such as customizable loyalty programs and solutions. In addition, this company’s network has reached over 5,000 users and 100 merchants in their well connected partnerships and community in less than two years. Despite this achievement, only a low percentage of consumers are using their smartphones to make their daily purchases across Canada creating difficulty in further promoting SmoothPay’s business. However, SmoothPay has focused in highly populated areas, such as universities. Therefore, this strategic decision has increased some brand awareness. Since this product lets consumers to easily connect with their payment accounts, such as Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, many have
In January 2014, SmoothPay was first launched in Toronto, Ontario offering mobile payments with integrated functions such as customizable loyalty programs and solutions. In addition, this company’s network has reached over 5,000 users and 100 merchants in their well connected partnerships and community in less than two years. Despite this achievement, only a low percentage of consumers are using their smartphones to make their daily purchases across Canada creating difficulty in further promoting SmoothPay’s business. However, SmoothPay has focused in highly populated areas, such as universities. Therefore, this strategic decision has increased some brand awareness. Since this product let consumers to easily connect with their payment accounts, such as Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, many have benefited from using SmoothPay’s quick and
. Mobile payment users >190 MM in2012, which is over3 % of total mobile users worldwide a level considered as "mainstream”
Mobile commerce, or m-commerce is defined as "any electronic transaction or information interaction conducted using a mobile device and mobile networks (wireless or switched public network) that leads to transfer of real or perceived value in exchange for information, services or goods" (Abbott 2012: What is m-commerce). On one hand, m-commerce seems to offer the ability for consumers to engage in transactions with greater ease and convenience. On the other hand, there is great concern that this convenience comes at a high price and is highly invasive in terms of its impingement upon consumer privacy. "New breed mobile commerce vendors, eager to send customers targeted ads and marketing offers based on the exact whereabouts of their cell phones," may tout the value of their services to consumers, but some users find this frighteningly intrusive in terms of the knowledge that can be accumulated on their whereabouts (M-commerce vendors attack privacy concerns, 2000, CNN). Despite the benefits of m-commerce, these serious concerns have not been fully answered [Thesis].
According to the most recent Federal Reserve study; most of us haven’t set foot in a banking hall in ages. It is a lost battle to banks that opt to use traditional methods to conduct their banking transactions (Gup 2003). By December of last year, close to half of all smartphone users in the United States had transacted some or all of their banking on their phones and iPhones. In the United Kingdom alone, rates of mobile banking transactions doubled over the course of a single year (Scn Education 2001). A banking business that invests in this type of technology gets assured of increasing their customer base.
However, with rapid development of mobile technologies and communication mobile payment quickly gains its popularity. People seek faster, safer and more convenient way to pay their bills. And mobile payment gives customers all of that. Even though the buzz around mobile payments coinside in time with Apple Pay introduction, momentum for mobile payment technologies was building even before Apple Pay debuted last fall. Some 17 percent of all smartphone users reported making a point-of-sale payment with their phone in 2013, up from 6 percent in 2012, according to a U.S. Federal Reserve survey. In-person mobile payments in the United States more than doubled in 2014, to $3.7 billion. (Hof, 2015)