Although the P2P app Venmo became widely known in the US, it seemed like the big US banks were almost ignoring the fintech revolution. Behind the scenes, however, consultations have continued since 2011 and finally culminated in the launch of Zelle in 2017, a new P2P payment app that supports over 30 US banks, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase.
This payment method can be used by anyone with a Visa or Mastercard debit card account, regardless of the financial service provider. The move demonstrates that banks are taking mobile messaging more seriously.
Whether you’re paying a restaurant bill together, repaying a debt to a friend, sending money orders, or paying for goods and services hand-held, peer to peer payments made informally from one person to another are a long-standing feature of the payments industry.
Whereas we used to pay by check, cash or bank transfer, today we increasingly pay using an online application, SMS or smartphone.
According to Juniper Research, the cost of person-to-person mobile payments will rise 40 percent worldwide to $ 540 billion by the end of 2017.
Companies are now racing to expand their geographic and demographic coverage, as well as to squeeze out competitors. In the UK in 2017, banking giants and big fintech companies will try to enter a scene where agile P2P startups have so far had a competitive edge.
Providers will focus on service monetization, especially as the market is growing. In the past, companies operated mobile P2P payments for free, even at a loss, as the service was focused on acquiring as many users as possible, according to BI Intelligence research.
However, as the number of subscribers grows and the service begins to use traditional revenue streams of firms, finding ways to monetize becomes crucial.
“P2P payments are a minimum margin business. This is not a business where you make a lot of money unless you have huge scale, ”says Aureli Lee Hossis, an analyst at Forrester Research.
For consumers, context will be critical. “It’s about convenience and simplicity,” says Hossis. She argues that those companies that ultimately come out on top will offer an ecosystem of integrated services, among which payments are complementary to other financial services.
This payment method can be used by anyone with a Visa or Mastercard debit card account, regardless of the financial service provider. The move demonstrates that banks are taking mobile messaging more seriously.
Zelle has decisive advantages over existing operators in the P2P payments market, especially in terms of speed. Money transferred over the network will be available to the recipient immediately, unlike most services, which usually take at least one day to complete the transfer to a bank account. This advantage is also important and convenient when people want to buy bitcoin with zelle or any other cryptocurrency.
“Banks are realizing that if they don’t offer a P2P payment service, they will start to lose their customers who use these applications frequently,” says Hossis. Zelle has already achieved impressive results and looks set to take P2P payments mainstream in the US.
In the first half of 2017, there were 100 million transactions worth $ 33.6 billion, more than double Venmo’s volume in the same time period.
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