If you ever send money to A and it actually goes to B, and for some reason the bank doesn't fix that the first time you get in touch with them, I recommend getting off the phone and escalating to an on-dead-tree letter:<p>Dear BigBank Legal Department:<p>This is written notice under Regulation E that BigBank has processed the following electronic transaction in error:<p>(Brief recitation of transaction details.)<p>You are required to investigate this matter within 10 business days of your receipt of this letter and provide me written confirmation of the results of your investigation. My desired resolution is a deposit of $XXX into my checking account with last four digits 1234.<p>Regards,<p>$YOU<p>You really want BigBank to put into writing "We think we've satisfied our obligation to you because you told us to send it to your mother and instead we sent it to somebody in Cincinatti; that was totes reasonable." Or, rather, you want a lawyer at BigBank to say "Eff no I am not putting that in writing; pay him $300 and charge it off to operational losses, that's what that budget is for."
A conglomerate of giant, old, non-tech companies tried to launch a casual and trendy service, and the software sucks? I'm shocked.<p>That said: "...a phishing email that appeared to be from Wells Fargo tricked her into entering her bank ID and password into a fraudulent website." This situation didn't depend on Zelle's existence to be possible. I would say the problem here is browsers not doing a good enough job helping people identify when a site isn't the one they think it is, but it's a tough problem.
Here in kiwi-land, a bank transfer from one individual or business to another is considered the most basic of banking services and all banks support it.<p>Here are some screenshots from the KiwiBank web interface, (but it's similar for all banks):<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/ug9VU5t.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/ug9VU5t.png</a>
<a href="https://i.imgur.com/HRsyQoN.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/HRsyQoN.png</a><p>There are no fees related to this unless you start doing international transfers, it's just part of the service.
I noticed that one of the issues with Zelle is that people have accounts at multiple banks that all support Zelle but they use only 1 phone number connected to their banking apps. So sometimes when I send money from my chase mobile banking app to my friend's number who also has chase mobile banking app, the money actually ends up going to his bank of america account because he uses the same phone number on bank of america mobile banking app as well. Sometimes this becomes a serious issue and I think there is no centralized way to change your 'Zelle' settings.
Early Warning is owned by a consortium of major banks. Supposedly during development of the apps, if any one bank wanted a feature the team basically had to implement it. Allegedly the team wasn’t allowed to push out the ship date or refuse new features, their only lever was adding more resource.<p>Any wonder why it shipped months late and with the most horrific reviews I’ve ever seen for a mobile app? My guess is fixing problems going forward won’t be an easier.
There needs to be a very large, very prominent warning on every transaction:<p>"ONLY SEND MONEY TO PEOPLE YOU KNOW."<p>"IF YOU SEND MONEY TO A SCAMMER, ZELLE WILL NOT HELP YOU GET YOUR MONEY BACK."<p>Zelle is not PayPal.<p>There is no dispute resolution service if the seller on Craigslist doesn't deliver and stops responding to your messages.<p>Don't use Zelle to send money to strangers.
The one thing I don't understand about Venmo is that it, based on my (limited) use, seems to show transactions amongst users in a "social networking" manner. I believe you are able to make your activity private, but why would anyone want it any other way? Am I the only one who thinks this is absolutely absurd? I am a very happy user of Square Cash as a result.
I've had problems with all of these online cash transfer "apps", so much so that I don't trust any of them. Venmo flagged my account and required me to "call them up" to "fix" things (yeah no).<p>I've used google pay the most, but I've sent money with google pay that never reached the destination bank (the destination bank said it was "google's fault", whatever we canceled the transactions).<p>I've sent money to an associate's email address with google pay and then a few days later she told me someone had withdrawn $999 dollars from her account associated with google pay. Her bank did get her money back after some days. yikes.<p>Banks should not be "moving fast" to "catch up". They should be providing a trustable experience. I have zelle available with my bank, but no way am I experimenting until it's been stressed out.
It's frustrating to me that I can't just go to my Wells Fargo account on the web and send money from my account to my recipient's account by routing and account number.<p>I <i>can</i> do that with my USAA bank account.
Is any of this actually new or unique? If you mail an old school check to the wrong address and never get your concert tickets, do you get your money back?
The Zelle app has had very poor Android support for quite a while... When I first tried to get the app to receive money it didn't even allow the account registration OR login flow to complete without the app crashing.
Venmo itself has had a long history of the same issues. The main problem here for Zelle is that they should have seen this coming and handled it a bit better.
haha I actually tried using Zelle a few days ago - "oh look, the banks are joining the future! lets try this". WRONG. Super convoluted and couldn't get it to work in the end, even after calling customer service.<p>Paypal was 30 seconds.<p>Zelle is Helle
> The catch is that the bank, like all the others that use Zelle, only considers transactions fraudulent if the customer did not authorize them.<p>How can the banks be so short-sighted? Soon a lot of people will hear that Zelle is not secure and they will avoid using it.