Zelle Means New Record for Bank of America in P2P Growth

January 17, 2018         By: Steven Anderson

Peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payments, until rather recently, was kind of an afterthought, if that. Even Apple Pay showed precious little interest in people being able to hand over cash to their friends or small business folks from a mobile interface. Then came Venmo, and the market changed; it was about that time that P2P started looking less like an afterthought and more like a way to make some serious coin. Zelle followed not too long after, and it’s already done big things for Bank of America.

Bank of America passed the word on to us about how Zelle delivered one major new year’s gift recently: record-setting numbers in P2P operations. Zelle transactions reached nearly 68 million for 2017, which was up 84 percent over the previous year. Bank of America alone processed better than 23 million transactions as part of Zelle, with a combined total of almost $7 billion.

At last count, Bank of America had almost three million active users for its Zelle system, and routinely adds several thousand such users a day. Given that Bank of America is one of just seven banks behind the creation and operation of Early Warning Services Inc., who is itself behind Zelle, the total numbers for Zelle itself may be even bigger than those put up by Bank of America.

Bank of America’s head of enterprise payments, Mark Monaco, noted “We’re excited to see the overwhelming growth, as customers increasingly turn to mobile payments that are fast, safe and easy. Zelle is another example of how we’re making it easier for customers to better manage their financial lives.”

The gains in the P2P mobile payments market have been staggering by any scale; if Venmo’s incredible success wasn’t enough to point out, a look at Zelle should finish the job and nicely at that. People like having the option to pay each other off—for any of a hundred reasons: covering a piece of the dinner tab, paying off a bar bet—or even just making simple payments of small businesses at a farmer’s market or the like.

Mobile payments is not just business-to-consumer (B2C) any more. If Venmo weren’t enough to prove that itself, then throw in Zelle to make it clear.