Early Warning Services’ payments app Zelle logged more than $1 trillion in payments sent by users in 2024.
The $1 trillion figure represents a 27% year-over-year increase in dollar amount sent over the platform, according to Zelle. Transaction volume hit 3.6 billion transactions, an increase of 25% when compared with 2023. The average transaction price landed at $277.78. Early Warning did not release a specific dollar amount.
“[Users are] doing everything from holiday gifting to paying their rent on Zelle, so it’s really become this valuable tool across the country,” said Denise Leonhard, general manager of Zelle, in an interview.
Small businesses were a key driver of growth in 2024, Leonhard said. Small businesses sent or received a total of $283 billion across more than 500 million transactions in 2024, representing a 32% increase on both a dollar- and transaction- volume basis, according to Zelle. The average transaction price of small business transactions hit $566.
Nearly 25% of all Zelle users – or 23 million users – sent a payment to a small business in the fourth quarter of 2024.
“Q4 is always strong for us, and partially because it comes with the holiday season,” Leonhard said. “As you can imagine, people are doing holiday gifting, they could be potentially paying each other back for holiday gifting, as well as we still see the normal everyday use cases of things like paying rent.”
Increased adoption of Zelle from community banks and credit unions also helped drive increased transactions last year, she said. Zelle has more than 2,200 financial institutions on its network, with 95% of those being community banks and credit unions.
“It’s not just about the large banks being on the network, but it’s really the small banks as well in order to ensure that as many people who want Zelle can have access to it,” Leonhard said.
Zelle has been betting that its direct integration with banks gives it a leg up in an
Zelle has also been leaning in on consumer education to drive adoption and mitigate concerns over potential fraud, Leonhard said.
“As well as being able to receive your funds very quickly… it’s also about ensuring that people are staying safe by using any sort of payment method, so that they make sure that whenever they’re sending money to people, they’re only sending money to people that they know and trust,” she said.
Zelle’s task going forward will be to maintain that growth while finding new ways to mitigate fraud and defend against an onslaught of competition.
Zelle and its bank owners, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, faced
Zelle is also competing with Apple’s wallet and other digital wallets as new technologies emerge that are more secure, Hawkins said.
“[Apple] already [has] it for that in person capability just to tap between the phones, which I think is great to eliminate the fat finger problem,” Hawkins said.
“The wallet on the phone will stay dominant over individual apps trying to create wallets,” she said. “We’ll see in 10 years if I was right or wrong, but the Apple Wallet is great, because I can load cards from all over the place, and I can look at bank accounts from any institution.”
Some banks, such as Bank of America, have been pushing Zelle as an alternative to checks, which also has given the P2P payments platform a leg up over its competitors, said Tony DeSanctis, a senior director at Cornerstone Advisor.
For example, Zelle transactions at Bank of America hit 270 million transactions in Q4 2024, compared with 90 million checks written in the same period. By comparison, Zelle transactions in Q4 2021 amounted to 144 million, with 129 million checks written in the quarter, according to the bank’s fourth quarter earnings presentation.
“In that respect, if I’m mitigating checks and check processing and check washing and check fraud and all of that, it’s a win,” DeSanctis said.
That check mitigation could help Zelle grow its small business market share in the future, DeSanctis said. “I think that the business application – and even Zelle for small business – is something we’re seeing pick up steam and fill a void that even Cash App and Venmo haven’t [filled]. They’re trying to take it from the merchant network angle, where I think Zelle for business is taking it more from the sort of vendor fulfillment, check mitigation angle.”