Bank of America’s customers continue to gravitate toward Zelle. The bank announced on its earnings call last week its customers sent $32 billion through the peer-to-peer payments tool during the second quarter.
“That’s impressive gains given the fact that total payment volumes have dropped,” Brian Moynihan, the bank’s CEO, said on the call. “Zelle is free to our industry’s clients and benefits our shareholders through lower costs. Above all it’s better for our customers.”
Zelle has seen consistent year-over-year growth among Bank of America customers. During the first quarter of this year, the bank’s customers sent $27 billion through Zelle, up from $18 billion in the second quarter of 2019.
Bank of America this quarter has more than 11 million customers using Zelle, up from 8 million year over year, and the tool processed more than 117 million transactions, up from just under 69 million in the second quarter of last year. Total payments, meanwhile, dropped from $791 billion to $690 billion year over year.
Zelle is operated by Early Warning Services, which is owned by Bank of America and a handful of other big U.S. banks. According to Early Warning, Zelle has 766 partner institutions and moved $56 billion during the fourth quarter of last year.
Customers are increasingly connecting with Bank of America through mobile channels, according to the earnings presentation. The bank saw 39.3 million digital banking users this quarter, up from 37.3 million users during the same period last year, and 30.3 million customers used mobile banking this quarter compared to 29.8 million last quarter. Digital represented 47% of the bank’s total sales, up from 29% during the second quarter of last year. Average logins per user increased 14% year over year, and the bank’s 665,000 digitally scheduled appointments is a record high, according to the bank.
See also: Bank of America customers sent $27 billion through Zelle in Q1
However, this digital growth does not come without risk. According to Uri Rivner, chief cyber officer at the behavioral biometrics company BioCatch, convenient digital payments create prime opportunities for fraudsters.
“Along with these new digital opportunities, many banks are now beginning to realize the far greater risk of online fraud that P2P payments expose,” Rivner recently wrote in Infosecurity Magazine. “Financial institutions, consumers, payment processors and others should learn from past experience and not fall into the convenience trap. The only way to stop Zelle fraud is to plan for a dynamic-based system of authentication and fraud prevention.”
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