My bank offers me like 50 garbage services every time I log in. Zelle falls into that bucket. I've never used it and barely know what it is, I just assume it's a scam like everything else banks offer.

It looks like a garbage service but it’s kind of great. It what I use to send money. It’s instant and free.

It's a little too instant. If you send money to the wrong place it's gone and IIRC it doesn't really help you confirm you're sending to the person you meant to.

Yeah, I found the UX for Zelle very confusing. I think it's why I prefer to do a bank transfer and wait for 2 days.

Zelle does roughly $490B/year in transaction volume (1/4 of total annual US card volume, ~$2T). If that's failure, I want to fail too! Venmo is closer to $230B in volume.

I feel like the branding really shot it in the foot. If they'd named it something less "startup-y" sounding, and marketed it as secure, instant transfers backed by the banks themselves, they might be in a better position.

I still use it all the time since it's a superior to any other offering for instantaneous high-dollar transfers, but it always feels like a "Venmo got embedded in my banking app" type of interface vs. "my bank is offering a direct payment service to it's other networked banks".

Hard to define, but I do think the marketing/branding/rollout were more to blame than the merits of the service itself (IMHO, Zelle is great).

Chase used to call it "Chase QuickPay", which was a great name. And when they joined Zelle and started supporting other banks it became "Chase QuickPay With Zelle". I don't know why it needed 2 product names but at least one of them told you what it did. And now it's just Zelle...

Yeah, if it had piles of VC money shoving it down people's throats it might have been received better.

The banks don't make money on it...so boring to them and therefore neglected from a marketing perspective.

The problem with Zelle seems to be that no one knows about it. Yet, I'm using it more and more all the time.

For example, the person who cuts my hair only takes cash. I asked if we could try Zelle (I rarely carry cash). She agreed, and we haven't looked back.

Has it failed? Zelle’s volume is more than twice that of Venmo and Zelle is growing faster.

I don't think Zelle has failed. I use it to pay my rent and to people who do odd jobs around my place.

Since EWS (The company that runs zelle) is effectively co-owned by a bunch of the large banks in the US, which has caused many of the small and mid-sized banks don't want to take part. They worry transaction information and the size of their bank (based on traffic) when leak its way to the large banks giving them some kind of advantage.

> with the explicit goal of being integrated with your bank so you don't need a separate account!

The goal of Zelle was to prevent the likes of Square Cash, Venmo, etc from dis-intermediating the banks from their customers.

Funny I tried to setup Zelle with TD Bank the other day and they told me not to use it to send money to myself.

How do Americans send money from one bank to another for accounts they operate?

Yeah Zelle doesn't really work well for that because I think you can only ever have one Zelle-enabled account because it's based on phone number or email.

Some banks offer external bank transfers through their online portal, and sometimes with a small transaction fee. I've been told by my bank with that transaction fee that you can avoid it by using the "bill pay" feature and just inputting your other bank account's routing and account information. I think that all works over ACH anyways.

I was hoping to use my catch all domain to resolve that e.g. [email protected], [email protected] which is what I do with Interac. Looks like it got me flagged.

Most bank accounts I've ever had in the US let you set up bank-to-bank transfers via the web site. It only requires a routing number and an account number.

TD too but that takes 24-48 hours and you have to go through a weird validation process. Two deposits are made to the receiving bank under and you're asked to confirm.

TD also wanted me to come into a branch with a bank statement from my other bank. Not ideal since they don't operate west of South Carolina and I'm in California.

The two deposit thing is pretty standard. A little odd, but it gets the job done and presumably does so using existing ACH interfaces (so they don't need to implement anything new or rely on the receiving bank to do the same)

Most services I use integrate Plaid. I believe Plaid is just a federated authentication glue that accesses your bank's systems and is granted access to account balances and ACH details (routing/bank account numbers).

It always struck me as an odd product, since I can just plug my ACH info in directly, but it does provide some level of convenience by allowing, say, a roboadviser app to show the embedded balances of my other accounts.

Plaid is a disaster waiting to happen—they store your banking username and password, and then use them to log in to your online banking on your behalf where they scrape the info they need.

I’m amazed banks put up with it.

The Plaid disaster hasn't waited- it's already started. They've already had to settle at least one class action lawsuit for deceptive practices

https://www.plaidsettlement.com/

It'll use app-specific passwords or OAuth with banks that support that, and both of those can be secured well enough.

The annoying thing with zelle is that every bank has different limitations. USAA for example has a 1k daily zelle limit. So it's completely useless for things like paying rent to a landlord unless you want to split a rent payment up over several days.

Yeah, honestly I didn't know it wasn't bank specific until I opened an account at a local credit union and it showed up as an option for transferring funds.