EXCLUSIVE — The year of 2017 has been marked with more than a few good and not-so-good trends: but we’ll stick to fintech. Aside from the important events like record-level funding for fintechs across the globe, cryptocurrency mania, Coinbase entering the Unicorn club at a $1.56B valuation in the last quarter, there have been some trends that caught our eye at Bank Innovation. These are the trends that are likely to continue in the next year.  Some of these are on BI’s list because of their novelty, and others because of their growing ubiquity in everyday life.

Here are Bank Innovation’s top five picks for fintech stories of the year:

1) Zelle Catches On

Often dubbed U.S. banks’ response to payment platform Venmo, Zelle surfaced its peer-to-peer ecosystem this year. A few months ago, many Venmo users hadn’t even heard of Zelle, but today the P2P app seems to have gained momentum. The bank-backed app from clearXchange/Early Warning has shown steady growth in popularity in the past quarters. The most recent (third) quarter seems to be its best yet. Bank of America, one of the app’s initial backers, reported its highest transaction numbers across the platform last month. And Zelle itself revealed numbers that show a great surge in its user base as well as transactions. Safe to say, next year we will see even more members on Zelle’s network, as banks continue to onboard the P2P platform with likes of IBM and ACI Worldwide partnering with Zelle to reach more and more FIs and banks. The question for 2018 as it was in 2017 remains — do users prefer Zelle or Venmo? Is there any reason to switch from one to the other?

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