Dive Brief:

• Peer-to-peer payments platform Zelle facilitated close to three billion payments last year for consumers and small businesses for a total value of $806 billion, the platform’s parent Early Warning Services said Monday.
• Both transaction volume and value grew 28% in 2023, compared to the previous year, according to a press release from EWS.
• Of the billions of transactions last year, about one-tenth of one percent, or 2.9 million payments, were reported as fraud or scams, the release said. That percentage continues to decrease, with Zelle sending about 700 million warning messages to consumers before they sent payments, according to the release.

Dive Insight:

Scottsdale, Arizona-based Early Warning Services is privately owned by seven major U.S. banks.

Zelle moved a total of $219 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, according to Monday’s press release. That value represents an 11% increase from $197 billion in the second quarter of last year, the last quarter for which the platform reported transaction data.

“The Zelle Network remains committed to providing consumers and small businesses a way to quickly and safely pay people,” Early Warning Services CEO Cameron Fowler said in the release. 

Zelle’s growth comes as tech giant Google is exiting the P2P payments market in the U.S., leaving competitors which also include Apple, PayPal, PayPal-owned Venmo and Cash App. Google announced that it would sunset its Google Pay app in June, and with it the P2P payment feature.

Early Warning Services may be busy putting together more data related to fraud and scams on Zelle. Last month,  Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and Jack Reed wrote an open letter to Early Warning Services requesting detailed information regarding its reimbursement policy, along with the number and total value of transactions reported as fraud or scams. The senators gave the company a deadline of March 13 to provide the information.

The letter comes after two years of scrutiny from lawmakers, following a New York Times report that said scams were flourishing on Zelle. 

Early Warning Services did not immediately respond to questions about its results from last year, or on the number of transactions reported as fraud or scams.