JPMorgan Steps Into P2P Payments With Bank of America, U.S. Bancorp

It wasn’t so long ago we heard about how Bank of America was staying out of the mobile wallet stakes in favor of offering infrastructure for others looking to get in.

A recent example of this may have cropped up recently as Bank of America got together with JPMorgan Chase & Co, as well as U.S. Bancorp, to put together a new peer-to-peer (P2P) based payment system that would allow customers to transfer money back and forth among the three brands.

The move is designed to offer up a challenge to Venmo, PayPal Holdings’ answer to P2P operations.

JP Morgan started offering the service just last Sunday, reports note, on the strength of a lot of customer requests. U.S. Bankcorp and Bank of America, meanwhile, have been offering a similar solution since last March, showing that there’s a lot of demand for this kind of service.

Reports from Bank of America’s managing director of payments, Mary Harman, suggest that further banks are likely to join in down the line.

Given that Harman is also chairman of the Early Warning System group operating the clearXchange network running the real-time payments system involved, it’s a safe bet that she’d know.

Harman projects that the “next wave of banks” to come on board will do so in the next 30 to 60 days, part of a growing effort to bring more user-friendly conditions to the financial industry, a move that should help keep some customers in the banks’ fold, as well as bring in some potential new customers.

With more and more customers looking to move away from banks in favor of other alternatives, the banks are responding by offering huge new rosters of services.

Indeed, banks need to expand their lineups of services to help keep customers on hand. While banks do have name recognition and the perception of security on their sides, that only goes so far against convenience and services. If banks can step up the offerings, and hawk the security and name recognition angles, this could be just what banks needed to pull some folks out of the mobile device camps.

It’s a process just getting started, but the coalition effort may help return some relevance to the banks after a long while under fire from the newcomers.