Venmo Touch Will Help Chicago’s Braintree Bump Mobile Transactions Past $2 Billion A Year

Screen Shot 2013-04-04 at 4.29.44 PMBraintree, a payments gateway that’s backed by Accel Partners and NEA, sounds like it has effectively doubled the volume of mobile transactions it sees per year to $2 billion. It now touts 40 million credit card accounts in its vault.

How does that compare to competitors? eBay, which operates Paypal, said it had 123 million registered accounts in its last earnings filing and that it expects to generate about $20 billion of mobile commerce and payments volume. So while Braintree is still smaller, it’s one of the few notable upstart companies in the space. Y Combinator’s Stripe is the other one with its formidable concentration of technical talent.

Braintree made waves last year when it acquired Venmo, a New York-based mobile payments startup that made it easy and frictionless to transfer cash back and forth via texts and e-mail.

The company kept Venmo’s brand name when it launched a series of products including Venmo Touch, which makes it easy for consumer to store their payments information across a network of Braintree-supported apps like HotelTonight, Airbnb and Uber. The idea is to reduce friction in entering credit card information, so that customers won’t abandon potential purchases.

Instead of having to re-enter your credit card information whenever you sign up for a new mobile service that’s Braintree-supported, Venmo Touch will automatically remember your payments data with one-click. Venmo Touch has been in beta, but now it’s fully launched and available for all Braintree merchants.

On top of that, they’re releasing a new iOS SDK, which will make it easier for developers to create a native checkout flow with stock UI images and suggestions for text. It has a payment form, that already contains plenty of credit card entry user interface elements, and other features that help catch typos. They’ll bring both Venmo Touch and an improved SDK to Android in the near future.

Braintree has raised $69 million in venture capital to date from New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners, RRE Ventures and Greycroft Partners.