Venmo Expands Stash Cash-Back Rewards Program

The PayPal-owned company announced the expansion Wednesday (April 15), characterizing it as part of its evolution from peer-to-peer payment app to money movement service, letting users get cash back on purchases from their favorite lifestyle brands.

“From dinner with friends and a rideshare home to a new outfit, those everyday moments are now even more valuable,” Venmo said in a news release. “The more customers spend with Venmo, the more they get back.”

Aside from Venmo Debit Mastercard purchases, the Gen Z-focused expansion now lets customers get up to 5% cash back when they pay with Venmo at their chosen “bundle” of merchants. The company introduced the Stash program in November of last year.

Beyond Stash, the release added, Venno’s merchant network continues to expand, with recent additions that include Pizza Hut, Sephora, Taco Bell and Ulta.

“These are the brands that define how the next generation shops, eats, and lives. And increasingly, how they pay,” the company said.

The expansion follows last month’s announcement that a new integration with PayPal would allow Venmo users to send and receive money with hundreds of millions of PayPal users across 90 markets. The company called it the “largest expansion of Venmo’s addressable market since the app’s launch.”

This means Venmo users can now access one of the world’s largest peer-to-peer (P2P) payment networks. The company said this alleviates a common P2P frustration: “app fragmentation” has made sending money to friends and loved ones unnecessarily complicated.

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that P2P payments using a digital wallet are seen as the norm in countries like the U.S. (70%), Germany (73%) and Japan (67%).

But despite the strength in P2P, the U.S. still trails many other countries in adopting mobile payments for in-store transactions, with only 17% of consumers reporting that they had used this method for their most recent point-of-sale purchase.

“The report suggests that the U.S. may be held back in in-store mobile adoption by factors such as outdated payment terminals, slower technological adoption rates and consumers’ continued strong ties to traditional card-based and cash methods,” PYMNTS wrote.

“While mobile payments represent 20% of in-store transactions globally as the fastest-growing method, the U.S. figure of 17% (or 17.4% based on percentage change data) indicates room for significant growth.”