EXCLUSIVE – Bank of America had five million transactions via the digital payments service Zelle in October alone, an amount 35% higher than the average 3.7 million transactions per month the bank reported in September 2017.

Yesterday evening, the bank announced that it processed a total of $1.5 billion dollars through Zelle in the month of October. Given the peak shopping period for the holiday season, that number might see an even bigger bump in the coming months.

In a statement Tuesday , Mark Monaco, head of enterprise payments at Bank of America, said:

Our customers are increasingly choosing electronic payments over cash, and Zelle is becoming their first choice for convenient, secure payments. The introduction of Zelle has nearly doubled the adoption of our P2P technologies year over year.

In yesterday’s report, the bank also said it had reached more than 2.5 million active Zelle P2P users per month, and “continues to add thousands of new users every day,” the report states.

According to a September report, that number comes out to an average of 194,000 new users per month.

Indeed, the bank-backed P2P app has seen a rise in usage since it first appeared on the mobile banking scene this summer. Zelle announced a surge in Q3 payments with more than 60 million real-time P2P transactions totaling $17.5 billion.

Moving into mobile banking apps this past June, Zelle was formed by Early Warning, a company owned by seven U.S. banks (including Bank of America) to counter (or benefit from) the growing popularity of payment app Venmo. But unlike Venmo or Square Cash and other players in the space, Zelle was able to provide realtime payments, as opposed to the typical 24-hours-or-more time lapse.

Currently, Bank of America has over 24 million active mobile users. During the third quarter, it reported that its customers made more than 32 million mobile bill payments and deposited more than 330,000 checks daily using their mobile banking apps.

To learn more about the latest developments in P2P payments and mobile banking, join us on March 5-6, 2018 at the Parc 55 in San Francisco for Bank Innovation 2018. Click here to register.