Zelle, the mobile payment service of U.S. Bank, says that close to 100,000 customers sign up for the payment app on average each day.
According to news from TechCrunch, Zelle said it processed more than 247 million payments last year, which marks a 45 percent jump from 2016. It handled a total of $75 billion in peer-to-peer (P2P) payments in 2017. That marks a significant increase from the $55 billion it garnered the year before.
Currently, the service, which was called clearXchange back in 2016, counts Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase as backers. In the summer of 2017, the firm said more than 30 banks in the U.S. were backing the mobile payment service. Zelle introduced a standalone app after rebranding it Zelle in the fall of last year, noted TechCrunch.
Today, the number of banks and financial institutions supporting the company hovers around 60, with 50 percent of demand deposit accounts located in the U.S. The partner ecosystem now includes ACI Worldwide, CGI, D3 Banking Technology and IBM, with partners FIS, Fiserv and Jack Henry & Associates already in the mix. Zelle expects to add more banks and consumers to its service this year. According to TechCrunch, the app is available on more than 95 million phones, but Zelle wouldn’t say how often customers actually use it.
Zelle is built directly into member banks’ existing mobile apps, which is theoretically an advantage, since some 80 percent of Americans have downloaded their bank’s mobile app — though it’s not clear how often average consumers actually use them on a day-to-day basis. While some studies show well over half of all consumers regularly using their mobile banking app to do things like check balances, other less optimistic studies indicate that only about 20 percent of consumers actually use those bank-affiliated mobile apps. Additionally, Zelle has a name recognition issue to overcome, as its competitor in the P2P payments space, Venmo, is well-known and well-loved by its user base.