How Venmo simplified mobile data collection

Venmo makes it easier for customers to pay friends and family securely. Venmo was the first scale player in the peer-to-peer mobile payments space; but, as time passed, competitors including many of the big banks started offering their own peer-to-peer payment products. Still, Venmo maintains its leaderships due to a strong focus on customer experience.

As part of a highly data-driven organization, Venmo’s data engineering and analytics team was inundated with mobile data collection requests from their counterparts on the marketing and product teams. Making matters worse, customer data was housed across a number of different warehouses and tools, requiring manual wrangling to harmonize each time a new question was posed.

Data collection: Venmo centralized mobile data collection from their payment systems as well as their iOS, Android, and web properties via mParticle.

Data transformation: mParticle deduped and harmonized all the data sets around a single set of customer identifiers. This included mapping anonymous to logged-in IDs where possible.

Data connection: The combined datasets were delivered securely to a central warehouse, allowing data engineering and analytics to analyze it all in one place.

On a typical day, Venmo uses mParticle to collect and connect more than 130 million customer events and the team is constantly building new models off this data to generate new insights. As an example, one modelling exercise uncovered that Venmo’s social feed could be altered to significantly impact customer experience; the resulting product modification resulted in a 30% increase in engagement.