The bank-owned peer-to-peer payment network Zelle saw first-quarter total transaction volume rise 31% year-to-year, to $180 billion, Early Warning Services announced on Monday.
The number of transactions on EWS' Zelle network during the quarter that ended March 31 reached 639 million, up 29% over the first quarter of 2022, amounting to about 5,000 transactions a minute, or about $2 billion a day sent through Zelle, EWS' CEO Al Ko said in a
More than 1,900 financial institutions are now directly integrated with Zelle, up by about 100 since the end of 2022. Credit unions accounted for nearly half, or 46%, of all financial institutions that went live on the Zelle network during the first quarter of this year, according to Ko's post.
"Zelle allows banks and credit unions of all sizes to compete on equal footing with larger financial institutions," Ko said.
But a portion of smaller financial institutions still balk at adopting Zelle due to ongoing concerns about liability for fraud and scams. Banks and credit unions currently are not required to reimburse Zelle users tricked into making "user authorized" transfers to crooks, although last year, lawmakers began pushing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to
Last year, a handful of small banks adopted a Zelle alternative called
Researchers at New York-based email cloud technology firm
A clue to the scam is a shortened URL in the message leading to an email unrelated to Zelle, according to Avanan, but certain victims were deceived nonetheless and sent irrevocable funds to the crooks.
Early Warning recently said it
In today's LinkedIn post, Ko reiterated EWS' claim that only a tiny fraction of Zelle transactions involve fraud and the fraud rate has continued to decline since the P2P service launched in 2017.
"We have increased network-level controls to prevent bad actors from transacting on the Zelle network and reduced their run time on the network," Ko said in the LinkedIn post.
