Regardless, avoid PayPal and Venmo at all costs, as there are reasonable alternatives for many use cases. They have avoided regulation more traditional financial service providers operate under (banking regs), so using them is to invite suffering.
Zelle is a trade name of Early Warning Systems, which maintains databases of what you do in your bank account (checks paid and deposited, monthly balances, etc.). I would assume the banks that have native Zelle integration are required to become members and share this information anyway.
https://www.earlywarning.com/about
If your threat model is that you don’t trust your bank with your deposit account balance and transaction history, that is hard to mitigate. I don’t necessarily trust my bank, but I do know what regulators to call for recourse when they misstep.
Where can I find more info about the '8 months' estimate? I hoped RTP would be useful to me, but the only bank that allows consumer accounts to use their RTP network is Chase. I hope this new network also doesn't fall short of the promise.
I have been a long-time Venmo user and have refused to ever link my account through Plaid. Starting a couple years ago, Venmo begin to intermittently claim they "Lost the connection" to my bank and forced me to link via Plaid. I always refused and the problem eventually went away. Now, I cannot send money to anyone via Venmo. It always gives me the same error message and asks me to link via Plaid. Extremely dark pattern.
Otherwise, I agree with plaid being bad.
And that's varying by bank too. I can only send $1000 per day total by Zelle (except a "day" is much longer than 24 hours usually) and some accounts are silently rejected as recipients. My girlfriend has to pay the rent (I pay my share to her over multiple days) because I can't send to my landlord at all and even if I could, the amount would be wrong. She has neither limit.
There's a nonzero chance you will hit some kind of risk/fraud system based on amount too.
Wire is much better but frequently $50-100 per transaction as a fee.
Just for comparison, in Germany, bank transfers are free and take 1-2 days, for a fee or free (depending on the bank) you can do instant transfers taking seconds.
(If you don't explicitly have overdrafting off, so that it would just fail your transaction instead of letting it go through. The default setting may have changed in the last decade due to law but I remember these scenarios vividly)
$0 balance
+$20
-$1
-$1
-$1
Within a day or two of each other won't necessarily be positive $17 balance.
It could easily become:
$0 balance
-$1 (overdraft fee $40)
-$1 (overdraft fee $40)
-$1 (overdraft fee $40)
+$20
= negative $103 balance
Banks make a lot of money doing this to poor people. The financial class is full of super-predatory behavior.
Gaining access to a credit union was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Do not use any service that uses Plaid.