Above "the Venmo Line"

Money Isn’t Free, but Moving It Is Now Cheaper - Payment startups disrupt traditional cash-transfer firms by offering nearly instantaneous, zero-cost services

Excerpt:

Take Venmo, for example. Venmo is the Snapchat of money in that it’s wildly popular with 20-somethings and on college campuses, and yet it is so unlikely to be used by people older than 30 that internally, the company calls that age the “Venmo line.” Venmo’s mobile app makes it easy to pay friends for just about anything, usually things like rent or your portion of last night’s bender. In 2014, the company handled $2.4 billion in transactions, and it is growing so quickly that it did half that amount of business in the first quarter of 2015 alone.

The cost of using Venmo is zero. Early in the company’s history, this business plan, or lack of it, nearly killed the startup, but an acquisition by payments company Braintree (which was later purchased by behemoth PayPal) saved it. Like countless other newfangled payment services, including competitors Square Cash, Google Pay and even payments in Facebook Messenger, the reason Venmo can charge nothing is that payments within its network are just data bits moving around in a database somewhere, rather than dollars being moved between bank accounts.

Comment: See also: Quartz coins “the Venmo Line”: Reminding us that the under-30 crowd lives in a totally different digital world, Read what happens when a bunch of over-30s find out how Millennials handle their money, Venmo

Quartz’s editorial team stumbled upon a generational divide earlier today, describing the phenomenon “the Venmo line.” One one side of the line are millennials and their elders who value privacy and view digital services that threaten it with suspicion. On the other side are youthful, digital natives who view public sharing as foundational an element of their lives as breathing. Judging by Quartz’s unscientific data, this line appears to fall right around 30 years old

Comment: I've used Paypal and money transfer with both Wells Fargo and Capital One 360. The image above is from Logan's Run, where when one reaches the age of 30, they are vaporized. I was 27 when it came out in 1976