Zelle is one of those services that sounds good in theory but when you actually try using it you realize that the real life use-cases are very near nil.
"You can send money directly! *"
* If you have a pre-established out-of-band trust relationship and dispute resolution system with the person you're sending it to.
Which basically means you can send money to friends and family and that's about it. But you can also do that with Venmo or CashApp. Any online transaction among strangers that uses Zelle is 100% a scam. Full stop. There's a reason that groups that sell things plaster in giant bold letters to use PayPal G&S.
By far the biggest value-adds of Zelle existing is making it really obvious who the scammers are.
Ya know what, fair. That's a more sensitive risk profile than I operate under and Zelle is 3rd party to my bank but if you bank with one of the major national banks I can see that providing some comfort.
It's not actually that sensitive a risk profile -- Paypal has shown itself to be untrustworthy with how it'll just freeze an account that you have a bunch of money in or explicitly suck extra money out of your bank account or with the updated terms of service last year that they "backed down on" only slightly. Paypal also owns Venmo, so I won't touch that one. Not sure about CashApp, but I only see it listed by sketchy people and instagram influencers, so I've never considered it trustworthy to begin with. At least Zelle was part of the services provided by my bank (Chase)? Clearly it's worse than that initial impression in practice, but I'm not sure that it's really worse than Paypal or CashApp?
Zelle is not exactly 3rd party since it is operated by a company that all the big banks themselves own (and assuming you have an account at one of the big banks):
I can get money in my kids bank accounts within minutes, with no fees, all from my banking app and without giving access to my money to some other shady techbro company. Seems like a pretty great use case and one I use every month.
"You can send money directly! *"
* If you have a pre-established out-of-band trust relationship and dispute resolution system with the person you're sending it to.
Which basically means you can send money to friends and family and that's about it. But you can also do that with Venmo or CashApp. Any online transaction among strangers that uses Zelle is 100% a scam. Full stop. There's a reason that groups that sell things plaster in giant bold letters to use PayPal G&S.
By far the biggest value-adds of Zelle existing is making it really obvious who the scammers are.