Venmo Offers Help for High Inflation Holidays

With Americans preparing to enter a holiday shopping season they might not be able to afford, Venmo has debuted a pair of tools it says are designed to help consumers spend smarter.

Beginning Tuesday (Nov. 22), customers can find and donate to the charity of their choice using the Venmo app, and will now encounter “a cleaner peer-to-peer (P2P) payment screen for sending money,” the mobile payment firm said in a news release.

“Customers will see a new send money experience that makes it easier for customers to see exactly how much they are sending and to who,” Venmo said.

That’s because the app has added profile pictures to let users see who they’re sending money to, along with a larger font size for dollar amounts. Venmo said it has also made it easier to pay or request more than one payment at the same time.

Users “can tap the plus (+) button next to the first recipient’s profile picture, which will allow customers to scroll through a list and add multiple recipients to the transaction,” the release said. “Venmo will display the total amount to be sent or received as well as the amount for each person.”

Customers can give to charities by browsing through a verified list in their community, by searching trending charities, or by searching by category (animals, education, disaster relief).  Donations can be made using a Venmo balance, linked bank account, or debit or credit card.

This offering comes during a holiday shopping season in which buying gifts could be out of reach for many Americans, as PYMNTS research has found.

The latest “New Reality Check: The Paycheck-To-Paycheck Report: The Holiday Shopping Edition,” a PYMNTS and LendingClub collaboration, found that 15 million consumers who shopped for gifts last year wouldn’t be doing so during the 2022 holiday season.

Nearly 8 in 10 respondents said they would shop for the 2022 holiday season, down from the 88% who shopped last year.

“It’s such a sad statistic that came out of this report,” Anuj Nayar, financial health officer at LendingClub, told PYMNTS. “That means people are not buying gifts, many for the first time.”