Zelle

Depending on the data, Zelle can be seen either as a leading target for fraudsters and scammers, or better than average at stopping these criminals.

The new bank-led digital wallet is signing up financial institutions, but payment experts say broadening its merchant base and reaching consumers will be an uphill climb.

The bank doubled down on promises to use legal action if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau brings an enforcement action against it related to fraud on the Zelle platform, saying in a statement that it would "not hesitate to seek assistance from courts."

The tech giant is enabling users to pay by holding smartphones together, potentially cutting into the market for Zelle, PayPal and Venmo.

Executives from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are expected to get grilled in Congress this summer over victims of Zelle scams who don't get reimbursed. A Senate panel has spent much of the last year examining fraud on the bank-owned payments network.

Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts asked Early Warning Services, which operates the payment platform Zelle, to clarify its reimbursement policy around impostor scams.

Corporations and trial lawyers have long fought over whether consumers should be forced into arbitration to resolve their complaints. Now there's a new wrinkle: It's becoming harder for aggrieved customers to even get to arbitration.

The bank hasn't explained why person-to-person payments, bill processing and account-transfer services went down for parts of two days this week. But observers suspect glitches in its legacy systems could occur at other financial institutions and increasingly affect real-time payment networks.

Financial institutions continue to push back against efforts to be held liable when a consumer is tricked into sending a payment that later turns out to be a scam.

The banks that own the peer-to-peer payment network are reportedly considering a retail launch that could fend off rival payment methods — or simply cannibalize the sizable revenue issuers get from credit and debit cards.