Venmo: Send & Receive Money for Android

Send and receive money with friends or split purchases with the Venmo mobile payment service.

Pros

Add friends: To get started, import your phone contacts or add all your Facebook friends who use Venmo. For a more measured approach, search for a person's name or username to add friends one at a time.

Share the expense: If you use your Venmo account to make a purchase, the app prompts you to add friends to the transaction and then automatically calculates the amount each person owes you. If you use a linked bank account or card, you need to do the calculations and request payments yourself. Either way, transferred money is added to your Venmo balance. To send the funds to your bank account, you need to initiate the transfer from your balance.

Send money: You can also send money to family and friends. Select a person, enter an amount, and click Pay to transfer money to the other person's Venmo account. You can add a note of explanation and select an appropriate emoji, such as for pizza, rent, or beer.

Affordable fees: Venmo charges a 3 percent fee when you pay with a credit card. Transactions made through your Venmo balance, bank accounts, debit cards, apps, and mobile websites are free.

Track transactions: Keep track of purchases, including when and where, in the Purchases tab. Your feed also displays recent transactions with friends.

Cons

Privacy: By default, you can see a person's list of friends and transaction feed. To control who can see your profile, go to Settings and under Sharing, choose who can view your transactions: the public, friends, or just participants. You can also change settings on past transactions.

Bottom Line

With Venmo, transferring money between friends to split rent, a bill, or an Uber ride is a snap. Your activities and feeds are displayed by default to the public, however, so your first step after installing the app is locking down your feed.

Emojis for your Venmo card, custom split amounts for your payments, and a few tweaks under the hood to make your experience better!