Venmo is getting its first full app overhaul since its inception in 2009, and it’s addressing some major UX issues that have made using the platform feel like the digital equivalent of flipping through a phone book.
When Venmo was launched, it was a breath of fresh air in the finance space. It stood out for its social network-style approach to bill splitting and rent requests. Since then, though, Venmo’s aspirations have far outgrown its app interface.
In the first quarter of 2025, PayPal (Venmo’s parent company) shared that Venmo’s revenue had grown 20% year-over-year, with total payment volume up 10%. According to Alexis Sowa, Venmo’s SVP and general manager, the app boasts over 100 million active accounts and 67 million monthly active users, with the average user visiting the app 10 times per month.
That user behavior reflects a broader effort at Venmo; the brand has spent the last several years shifting from an occasional peer-to-peer money lending service to a more all-encompassing financial tool.
In 2018, the company introduced a debit card feature that took it from an app to part of users’ wallets, which it has since expanded through partnerships with retailers like TikTok Shop, Uber, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and more. And, last fall, Venmo debuted its own rewards program to keep users engaging with the platform.
Venmo is expanding its capabilities to become an everyday payment method. For users, though, many of those updates have gotten buried in the app’s archaic, scattered design. Finally, it’s getting a facelift that brings its UX out of the 2010s—and fixes one of its most perennially irritating features.
[Image: Venmo]
Venmo’s complicated design web
Sowa and her team have spent the last year interviewing customers to learn how they use Venmo, which features they like the most, and where they’re experiencing the biggest sticking points on the app. Their biggest learning, she says, was how many new Venmo features customers simply don’t know about—or can’t find.
As Venmo began introducing more advanced features over time, Sowa says its engineering team needed places to put them that fit within the app’s existing information architecture. That meant new functionalities would get buried in unexpected places.
To send a gift card, for example, users would have to first initiate a payment to the recipient in order to activate the gift card flow; or to split an expense with a group, they would have to navigate out of the payment tab and into their own profile settings. Using Venmo was starting to feel less intuitive, and more like hunting for buried Easter eggs.
Untangling this convoluted web of information required Sowa’s team to rework Venmo’s app from the ground up—updating each of its key sections to surface new features and make payments easier.
[Image: Venmo]
Username search is finally getting the boot
Venmo’s app updates will roll out in phases over the coming months, starting with the Home page. The ethos of this page remains relatively unchanged; you can still browse through others’ transactions and interact with them. Now, though, the feed has been pared down to be less information-dense and more proactive.
The design team increased the feed’s font sizes to highlight relevant details, like who was paid and how much, and given users the option to browse through a portfolio of curated hero images to accompany their payments.
They’ve also added buttons to make payment flows simpler. If a user grabs some seats on Ticketmaster, for example, Venmo will automatically surface a “Split” button to share the cost with friends; or if a user pays a friend, Venmo will automatically offer a “Pay again” feature to make the next payment quicker.
Outside the feed, the app’s most noticeable changes will show up in the new version of the Pay/Request hub. In the old version of Venmo, this page loaded as a black-and-white list of individual contacts and names crowding the screen. In order to make a group for splitting payments, users had to navigate out of this hub and into their personal settings.
Perhaps most frustrating, though, was the process for adding a new friend. Every Venmo user will be familiar with the experience of trying to search for someone on the app, only to realize that the only way to find them is by already knowing their exact Venmo username—dashes, nicknames, and all.
In the new version of the Pay/Request hub, the phonebook-style list of names has been scrapped for a more aesthetically pleasing bubble layout. This function analyzes users’ payment history to display their top contacts inside a central web graphic.
The new layout also allows users to make groups directly in the Pay/Request hub, and displays frequently used groups within the web. Sowa says her team is working on AI tools designed to suggest new groups based on payments—like, for example, a roommate cohort based on recurring rent payments.
And, at last, the search function has gotten an upgrade. Now, users can search for new friends with their phone number and instantly locate their profile, bypassing the rigamarole of reading usernames aloud. According to Sowa, this feature rolled out in early 2026 as part of a new integration with PayPal, which allows Venmo and PayPal users to send money to each other directly through either app.
As Venmo angles for an expansion of its brand’s capabilities, its new app is providing the UX jumping board it needs to make sure that users can find new features—and start to treat Venmo more like a one-stop shop for managing their money.
