U.S. Bank Rolls Out Two New Options

Mobile payment programs keep emerging in the market, and surprisingly few actually depart the market, suggesting that the entire mobile payments market is in a growth stage or possibly approaching maturity. Two new mobile payment options recently emerged from U.S. Bank—Disbursements via Zelle and Supplier Prefer Pay—providing a new slate of tools for users to put to work and give U.S. Bank a leg up in this growing market.

Disbursements via Zelle is about what it sounds like; geared toward the individual user, this platform allows users to readily route payments to other users with nothing more than a mobile number or an email address for authentication. It turns to the Zelle network, which was put together recently in a bid to stop Venmo’s seemingly non-stop advance.

Meanwhile, Supplier Prefer Pay works more at the corporate level, offering new options to pay suppliers. It helps users move away from checks, which can take time to go through the mail and be processed and the like, time better spent doing just about anything else.

U.S. Bank has found a good way to put Zelle to work here, and is showing off the true capability of this program. The problem, as is ever the case for a comparative newcomer to a market, is proving to the end user why they should stop using the tool currently used—likely Venmo—in favor of this new program, Disbursements via Zelle.

There’s not a whole lot to recommend it; it doesn’t do much that Venmo doesn’t already, there’s no clever social interaction, and the name is a mouthful. How much of a tool will the average twentysomething feel saying “Hey, lemme pay you by Disbursements via Zelle” as opposed to “Dude, I’ll Venmo you tomorrow.”?

Supplier Prefer Pay, however, may do better; almost like a Venmo for business—and business users don’t care about adding emojis to receipts—it’s likely to serve as convenience and respectability in one. That’s valuable for the end user, and thanks to that bank backing, it could have name recognition enough to make it a pull. U.S. Bank might well have at least half a winning program here; Disbursements via Zelle has its work cut out for it, but Supplier Prefer Pay could be onto something.