Cash App vs. Venmo

A Look Inside America’s Most Popular Consumer Finance Applications

Popularized in China, digital wallets are becoming ubiquitous globally. PayPal’s Venmo and Square’s Cash App1 are attracting tens of millions of customers and evolving from peer-to-peer payment applications into diversified platforms that offer many inexpensive consumer finance products and better access than banks do today. In this white paper, we present original research on Venmo and Cash App, enabled importantly by Venmo’s public API data. In 2024, we expect more than 220 million digital wallet users in the US which, if valued like bank customers at maturity today, could represent an $800 billion opportunity in the US equity market.

What is a Digital Wallet?

ARK defines digital wallets as smartphone-enabled financial ecosystems that provide access to a variety of services including wealth management, insurance, instant payments, and cryptoassets.