To commemorate World Emoji Day, Venmo explored just how its users use emojis in the money-sharing platform. Venmo users often include few words within their transactions. In fact, approximately 30 percent of Venmo transactions include no words at all; only emojis, according to the company.
“[Venmo has] always been focused on moving beyond a payment transaction and creating more of an experience for our customers,” PayPal Director of Global Consumer Initiatives, Pablo Rodriguez, told iDigitalTimes.
Check out the Venmo social feed and it’s a sea of cartoonish icons, through which users communicate the purpose of their transactions. Venmo’s most used emoji is the pizza slice, which is used every 20 seconds on the app, according to Rodriguez. Among the most used emojis include the clinking beer mugs, the flying money, the glass of wine and confetti. The company compiled its emoji findings from data within the application.
The PayPal-owned service allows users to transfer money to others electronically and primarily for social purposes, such as splitting a dinner bill, cab fare or even collecting rent from roommates. Users can also have fun with the experience by accompanying their transactions with notes to friends, family and colleagues, many of which are filled with emojis.
“For some of us who are a little older and remember writing actual checks, there was always the memo line where people would leave notes. The social feed on Venmo is essentially the new memo line,” Rodriguez told iDigi.
When paying a friend back for a dinner date, users located in Chicago or Brooklyn are most likely to send a pizza slice emoji. Those in New York City proper or the San Francisco Bay area are most often sending wine glasses. Those socializing in Boston and Philadelphia are most likely to do so over clinking beer mugs.
The top five U.S. locations using emojis on Venmo include the San Francisco Bay area, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Boston and Miami. New York City is number 11, while Houston rounds out the list at number 17.
Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge established World Emoji Day in 2014 as a way to recognize emoji’s lighthearted contribution to electronic communication. The commemoration is derived from Apple’s calendar emoji, which reads the date July 17.
Around the world, emoji fans celebrate the day by throwing emoji-themed costume parties, sharing emoji facts on social media, or simply by texting emoji-only messages to friends and family. On Venmo, however, it’s business as usual. If that business is associated with a larger dollar amount, users are most likely sending a house emoji with the transaction. This often indicates the transaction is housing-based, such as rent collection.
Such uses have helped Venmo thrive as a peer-to-peer banking service. The app processed $1 billion in user transactions in January 2016. In the early 2016 quarter, the app earned $3.2 billion.
Although Venmo is most used among millennials, the app also sees considerable interest among older users.
“We want to take the awkwardness out of payment,” Rodriguez told iDigi. “Being able to send or receive money, the ability to ask for money back, you can easily use Venmo to send those messages and use emojis if you’d like.”
