That could turn Venmo into a payment layer for both virtual and physical purchases from Apple, Amazon, and more.
The difficulty of adding a payment layer to a service online was encountered first-hand by cofounders Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur.
Today Marcus confirmed that this is the case, with Venmo part of how PayPal hopes to become more of a payment layer in apps, as well as to make a big move into peer-to-peer transactions.
Ultimately, HTML in some form is probably still the way to go here, but the payment layer in particular is a good argument for why the incentives of both Apple/Google and publishers should be aligned to make things more seamless on the native app level.
Carriers clearly have an interest in becoming a payment layer for all of that media as well as apps, since it brings them back into having a direct transactional relationship with their customers, something which initiatives like Apple's App Store initially took away from their purview.
Conversely — and maybe more importantly — those who provide a payments layer on digital platforms are increasingly moving into commerce.
But at the beginning of the year, Braintree announced an additional direction for the company with the debut Venmo Touch, essentially a payments layer for mobile applications.
The idea is for LevelUp to eventually be able to power and feed a variety of apps, becoming the hub or platform around which the apps using its mobile payment technology revolve — in other words, through its APIs, to do for "the mobile payments layer" what Facebook did for the social layer, he says.
Braintree, an Accel and NEA-backed payments company that's now processing more than $6 billion a year, is launching a new payments layer that lets users sign up to pay for goods and services without having to re-enter their credit card details.
As Cards unbundle certain apps, it gives Apple a powerful bundling opportunity, as well, the chance to control the payment, rewards, and redemption layers of mobile commerce.
