PayPal Says They’ll Soon Begin Supporting Instant Bank Transfers, Including in Venmo ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

PayPal announced this morning a plan to speed up money transfers between its service, Venmo and users’ bank accounts for those with supported MasterCard and Visa debit cards. This new “instant transfers” service will be available at a rate of $0.25 per transaction, and will deliver funds in a matter of minutes, instead of the day or so it typically takes when using PayPal or Venmo.

PayPal has been operating in the peer-to-peer payments business for nearly two decades, but the company has been more recently challenged by a number of newcomers, like Square Cash, for example, whose key advantage has been the ability to “cash out” to your bank account instantly.

PayPal says that they’re going to launch this ahead of the peer-to-peer Apple Pay support arriving with iOS 11, which will presumably launch in September. One of the hangups of peer-to-peer Apple Pay — when compared to, say, Square Cash — is that transferred funds sit on a virtual spending card in Wallet, instead of being immediately sent to a connected bank account.

No word on whether instant transfers, as with pretty much all of the popular peer-to-peer payment apps, will be a U.S.-only feature; I certainly hope it will launch worldwide. I still use PayPal for a few things, and I appreciate any way I’m able to treat it as a silent bridge between my bank account and places where I send and receive money.