Payments giant PayPal overhauled its iPhone and Android apps on Thursday, as it looks to capitalize on the growing trend of people making payments using their mobile phones.
PayPal said that one out of four transactions using PayPal’s digital wallet is now on mobile. The company processed $20 billion in mobile payment volume, up 45%, in the fourth quarter of 2015. Adding to that, Forrester Research predicts mobile commerce will represent more than one third of online transactions in 2016.
“We completely rebuilt the app and the experience for users,” PayPal executive Jo Lambert told Coins2Day.
PayPal said that sending money to friends and family is one of the most popular features of its wallet, with these transactions up 100% over the past two years. The company decided to create a more prominent hub within the app for these transfers, which will suggest transfers to people a users exchanges money with the most. Users will also be able to add people directly from their phone’s address book.
It’s not particularly surprising that PayPal (PYPL) is putting these peer to peer transactions front and center in the app. PayPal’s other digital payments app, Venmo, is seeing payments volume accelerate. Venmo processed $1 billion in January, which is two and a half times the volume from January 2015, and ten times the volume from January 2014.
For more on PayPal, watch this:
The home screen of the app also includes a news feed-like feature that will show users any recent transaction made using PayPal. This aimed to make the experience more personalized, explained Lambert.
She added that the new app also makes it easier for users to localize the experience in 145 different markets 17 languages.
