Zelle, Fiserv Add More Banks To Platform

If any evidence was needed to demonstrate the nation’s embrace of digital payments during the pandemic, more than 200 banks and credit unions have gone live on the Zelle Network via Fiserv Inc. this year.

Fiserv, the Wisconsin-based global provider of financial services technology, announced Tuesday (Oct. 6) that it has enabled implementation of peer-to-peer (P2P) payments for a total of more than 400 institutions via the Turnkey Service for Zelle, the digital payments network startup owned by Early Warning Services.

Zelle allows consumers to send and receive money from one bank account to another, often within minutes when both parties are enrolled.

Among the financial institutions (FIs) that have recently added or enhanced their P2P payment capabilities are The Federal Savings Bank and SECU.

“We chose Zelle because we wanted to offer our customers an innovative way to send money quickly via P2P,” said Jackie Katz, vice president of retail banking at Chicago-based Federal Savings Bank, in a statement. “We had been offering a different service, but it did not have the speed or name recognition. Since moving to Zelle via Fiserv, we have seen a nearly 1000 percent increase in transactions.”

Becky Smith, executive vice president, chief strategy and marketing officer at SECU of Maryland, which serves more than 250,000 members, said the bank’s strategy even before the pandemic was to push for more sophisticated digital technology to enable members to bank from home.

Thomas Allanson, president of electronic payments at Fiserv, said P2P payments have grown every month for the past three years and the recent pandemic has accelerated that trend.

“The number of financial institutions offering Zelle via Fiserv has more than doubled in 2020, expanding access to easy, fast and secure digital payments at a time people need them most,” he said in a statement.

Earlier this year, Matt Wilcox, senior vice president of payments innovation at Fiserv, told PYMNTS that recent data shows an increasing number of FIs are determined to satisfy a demand for real-time transactions.

The number of people sending money using Zelle was up 116 percent, and transactions increased by 207 percent in 2019 as compared to the previous year, he noted.

This confluence of events, Wilcox said, reveals a readiness on the part of consumers to embrace real-time payments, and an increasing readiness of FIs to serve them.

“I think the ‘why now’ has a lot to do with consumers’ expectations and the demand they are now placing on financial institutions, whether it be banks or credit unions,” he said. “And I think there’s a short list of investments that financial institutions want to make, to position them to grow their digitally engaged customers and members.”