- Zelle - a payments startup - has been integrated into 60 of its participating banks' mobile apps, providing rapid transfers of payments between users who have accounts at any of those institutions.
- The other better known payments startup Venmo has been on its own growth path ever since being acquired by Paypal in 2014.
- JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) CFO Marianne Lake recently said that the bank processed $41B of Zelle transactions in 2017, which is more than Venmo in total.
- “Venmo and Zelle are two very different animals,” responded PayPal (PYPL +0.2%) CEO Dan Schulman at a separate event that same day. Venmo is used more frequently for smaller transactions averaging around $60, while Zelle’s average transaction size is $300, he added.
- The other major difference is that Venmo makes money from merchants accepting it as a form of payment vs. Zelle is provided by banks as a free service to their customers.
- Banks look set to remain the driving force in payments as Venmo takes over small transfers, Zelle swallows slightly larger ones, but credit and debit cards keep the lions share of the payments business.
Original article