Venmo is getting its first full app overhaul since its inception in 2009, and it’s addressing some main UX points which have made utilizing the platform really feel just like the digital equal of flipping by way of a telephone ebook.
When Venmo was launched, it was a breath of contemporary air within the finance house. It stood out for its social network-style approach to invoice splitting and hire requests. Since then, although, Venmo’s aspirations have far outgrown its app interface.
Within the first quarter of 2026, PayPal (Venmo’s guardian firm) shared that Venmo’s whole fee quantity was up 14% year-over-year, marking its sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit development. In accordance with Alexis Sowa, Venmo’s SVP and normal supervisor, the app boasts over 100 million energetic accounts and 67 million month-to-month energetic customers, with the typical person visiting the app 10 instances monthly.
That person habits displays a broader effort at Venmo; the model has spent the final a number of years shifting from an occasional peer-to-peer cash lending service to a extra all-encompassing monetary device.
In 2018, the corporate introduced a debit card feature that took it from an app to a part of customers’ wallets, which it has since expanded by way of partnerships with retailers like TikTok Store, Uber, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and extra. And, final fall, Venmo debuted its own rewards program to maintain customers participating with the platform.
Venmo is increasing its capabilities to change into an on a regular basis fee technique. For customers, although, lots of these updates have gotten buried within the app’s archaic, scattered design. Lastly, it’s getting a facelift that brings its UX out of the 2010s—and fixes one among its most perennially irritating options.
Venmo’s sophisticated design internet
Sowa and her staff have spent the final 12 months interviewing prospects to learn the way they use Venmo, which options they like essentially the most, and the place they’re experiencing the most important sticking factors on the app. Their largest studying, she says, was what number of new Venmo options prospects merely don’t learn about—or can’t discover.
As Venmo started introducing extra superior options over time, Sowa says its engineering staff wanted locations to place them that match throughout the app’s present data structure. That meant new functionalities would get buried in sudden locations.
To ship a present card, for instance, customers must first provoke a fee to the recipient as a way to activate the reward card circulation; or to separate an expense with a gaggle, they must navigate out of the fee tab and into their very own profile settings. Utilizing Venmo was beginning to really feel much less intuitive, and extra like attempting to find buried Easter eggs.
Untangling this convoluted internet of data required Sowa’s staff to remodel Venmo’s app from the bottom up—updating every of its key sections to floor new options and make funds simpler.
Username search is lastly getting the boot
Venmo’s app updates will roll out in phases over the approaching months, beginning with the House web page. The ethos of this web page stays comparatively unchanged; you may nonetheless flick thru others’ transactions and work together with them. Now, although, the feed has been pared all the way down to be much less information-dense and extra proactive.
The design staff elevated the feed’s font sizes to spotlight related particulars, like who was paid and the way a lot, and given customers the choice to flick thru a portfolio of curated hero pictures to accompany their funds.
They’ve additionally added buttons to make fee flows easier. If a person grabs some seats on Ticketmaster, for instance, Venmo will mechanically floor a “Cut up” button to share the associated fee with mates; or if a person pays a pal, Venmo will mechanically provide a “Pay once more” function to make the subsequent fee faster.
Outdoors the feed, the app’s most noticeable adjustments will present up within the new model of the Pay/Request hub. Within the previous model of Venmo, this web page loaded as a black-and-white checklist of particular person contacts and names crowding the display. With a purpose to make a gaggle for splitting funds, customers needed to navigate out of this hub and into their private settings.
Maybe most irritating, although, was the method for including a brand new pal. Each Venmo person shall be aware of the expertise of attempting to seek for somebody on the app, solely to appreciate that the one approach to discover them is by already realizing their precise Venmo username—dashes, nicknames, and all.
Within the new model of the Pay/Request hub, the phonebook-style checklist of names has been scrapped for a extra aesthetically pleasing bubble structure. This operate analyzes customers’ fee historical past to show their high contacts inside a central internet graphic.
The brand new structure additionally permits customers to make teams immediately within the Pay/Request hub, and shows incessantly used teams throughout the internet. Sowa says her staff is engaged on AI instruments designed to recommend new teams primarily based on funds—like, for instance, a roommate cohort primarily based on recurring hire funds.
And, ultimately, the search operate has gotten an improve. Now, customers can seek for new mates with their telephone quantity and immediately find their profile, bypassing the rigamarole of studying usernames aloud. In accordance with Sowa, this function rolled out in early 2026 as a part of a brand new integration with PayPal, which permits Venmo and PayPal customers to ship cash to one another immediately by way of both app.
As Venmo angles for an growth of its model’s capabilities, its new app is offering the UX leaping board it must ensure that customers can discover new options—and begin to deal with Venmo extra like a one-stop store for managing their cash.
