Braintree starts linking its Venmo wallet to mobile bank Simple

Ever since Braintree acquired mobile wallet company Venmo it’s been trying to make it more than a peer-to-peer payment application. Earlier this year, it launched Venmo Touch, creating a cross-app payments credential service that allows you to enter your credit card and identification details into Venmo once and use it to make one-touch payments across a variety of e-commerce services, from Hotel Tonight, TaskRabbit and Wrapp.

Now Braintree is trying to make the mobile checkout experience that much more seamless by eliminating the need to enter your payment credentials even once. It’s starting to work with banks and credit-card issuers to automatically integrate their services with Venmo Touch. Its first partner is mobile banking provider Simple.

Simple isn’t so much a bank as it as front-end financial services provider that outsources the actual account to BankCorp Bank. But for all practical purposes, Simple is the only bank its younger technically savvy customers – many of whom have never entered a brick-and-mortar bank branch – ever use, said Shamir Karkal, Simple’s CFO and co-founder.

The partnership with Venmo does one basic thing: it puts Venmo Touch directly into Simple’s app linking it directly to the Visa debit card it issues to every customer. That may not seem like a big deal, but eliminates the final logistical step necessary to get the money in your bank account into the hands of the merchant you’re trying to pay.

Braintree CEO Bill Ready said that for mobile payments solutions to succeed they’re going to need to be absolutely frictionless. The more services a consumer has to sign up for, the more credit card number and address fields they have to populate, the more apps they have to download – the less patience they’re going to have with any given payment service.

Braintree has received all of requests from banking providers and card issuers to integrate with Venmo, Ready said, but it decided to work with Simple first because of its all-online and all-mobile background. Simple, however, is just a start. Ready said Venmo will open up to other financial institutions soon.