Do consumers want to share details of their transactions with their friends to immortalize their experiences together?

Mobile payments startup Venmo thinks so, which is why it made sure to make its social features more prominent in its latest app release that hit earlier this month.

With the June updates, the Venmo app provides greater real estate to a content feed that shows which friends are paying whom and for what, with users sometimes tapping in playful tongue-and-cheek messages to accompany their transactions.

“What we’re most excited about is the way the new apps showcase the inherently social nature of payments: people enjoy talking about the experiences and activities they pay for when they go out with friends,” co-founder Andrew Kortina (above) tells Bank Innovation. “The new apps make it easier to share payments when you want to, and, in the news feed on the home screen, you can see who your friends are spending time with, what they’re doing, and where they’re going.”

The social nature of Venmo’s payments may have something to do with the majority of its users, whom Kortina describes as young, but no longer in college, professionals who live in urban areas. “There is a very long tail of use cases, but by far the biggest bucket is what we call ‘going out’ – dinners with friends, drinks after work, lunches with colleagues, movies, concerts and trips,” he says. In other words, the predominant transactions are just the sort of ones users would want to herald because they represent users’ social lives.

I tested out the app with my colleague Christina Haberstroh earlier today. My take? The app’s design is simple and eloquent, which makes usability rather easy, but since I only have two friends using the app, it’s hard to get a sense of how “fun” is the activity payments feed. Still, I know when I pen my friends physical checks, I include personal messages, like “in the name of love,” on the checks. Given that, I’m sure I would enjoy translating my personal notes into digital P2P transaction memos. And one thing is for sure: the Twitter-like activity feed comes in nice and clear through Venmo’s app.

On tap for the startup this summer is to double down in studying its usage data and gleaning more user feedback so it can further improve its apps, Kortina says. But, of greater importance to fintech players is that Venmo will soon give birth to more opportunities to work with the company.

“We’re going to work on features that will give you the opportunity to use Venmo at more places by releasing an API that enables payments with different partners,” Kortina says.

When we asked Venmo about how it fits into other emerging digital wallets and banks’ P2P services, Kortina gave hints to a business possibility: “We actually don’t see a lot of other digital payment options as competitive – in fact, we would love to integrate with them,” he tells Bank Innovation. “Wherever adding a personal note to a payment and the ability to share it makes sense, we think Venmo should be an option.”