SAN JOSE, Calif.—PayPal has announced a plan to speed up money transfers between its service, as well as 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, Tech Crunch reported.
What may have prompted the move, according to Tech Crunch, is that 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. Now PayPal and Venmo will offer a similar option for debit card holders with supported cards from Visa and Mastercard.”
PayPal says the feature will be available to the vast majority of cardholders, except for some very small institutions.
“The feature arrives at a time when PayPal is shifting its focus from being a competitor to Visa and Mastercard, to being more of a partner. For years, PayPal encouraged users to link their bank accounts to its service, as a means of routing around the large payment networks. But last year, things changed,”