Zelle is not working on a point-of-sale payments solution right now.

“Zelle moved $25 billion last quarter,” said Norm Marraccini, vice president of product management and marketing, digital payments at FIS. “When are we going to see Zelle at the point-of-sale?”

Marraccini pointed out that Venmo’s payment volume for that quarter was less than half that, at $12 billion. But Venmo is beginning to make inroads in e-commerce and its parent company, PayPal, has been working to crack the point of sale for years.

Still, Marraccini stated via email that he was “not saying” that banks were asking for Zelle at the point of sale. Marraccini did not reply to further requests for clarification.

Early Warning, likewise, said in a statement that it would add new use cases “in response to consumer and industry demands,” but when confirmed that it was not working on the point-of-sale.

While a POS solution may not be on Zelle’s roadmap just yet, if Early Warning wants Zelle to continue its competition with Apple Pay and Venmo, some future payment capability outside of a P2P channel seems likely. Business acceptance of digital payments is higher in 2018, according to a report that FIS released last week. About 40% of small businesses said they would accept person-to-person payments “like PayPal” or payment via a mobile device. Altogether, SMB acceptance of digital payments is up 38% since the start of 2017.

Nevertheless, consumer acceptance of digital payments online and at the point of sale is a key to P2P payment growth.

“In my opinion, one of things that has slowed down adoption for both Apple Pay and Google Pay is that historically, if a user is not enrolled in the wallet, they don’t see it as a payment option at checkout,” Scott Harkey, global payments lead for boutique payments firm Levvel, told Bank Innovation via email. “That makes sense from a user experience perspective… but it means that only people already enrolled experience the better checkout experience or see where all it is actually accepted.”

Zelle seems to have overcome this hurdle by putting its service direct into banking applications.

However, the ability for businesses to accept Zelle as a payment method will depend on the banking relationship between the SMB and banks. As such, SMBs are starting to prefer community banks in order to work with a “smaller team,” Marraccini said. The bank’s recent PACE study shows 84% of SMBs are “very satisfied” with their community bank relationship, compared with 83% of those with top 50 bank relationships — essentially a wash.

“If I’m an SMB and I don’t deal in cash, I can accept cards, I can accept P2P — there’s no reason for me to go into the bank,” FIS’s Marraccini said.

This actually makes the banking relationship even more critical, he said.