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Comment by Tyrannosaur | Hacker News Reader

I frequently ask people "If all major American banks got together and implemented a system where you could send money from one bank account to another in a payment system much faster than ACH, would it be big news?"

And yet they did, but it was not big news. There is currently an instant payment system integrated with all major American banks for person-to-person transactions, and yet they somehow fumbled it so Venmo takes all the publicity.

Zelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle_(payment_service)

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Zelle has significant limitations for gross settlement and relies on a security model that leaves much to be desired.

Zelle also is a product of TCH, hence why "major banks" carries a lot of water. You can't leave behind rural and low income Americans.

Zelle works in 1000 banks and credit unions.

Yes, the platform is arbitrarily limited to $500 transfers and significant disclosures on why/how you want to use your money. ACH, checks and Venmo still win out

No it isn't. All of the major banks allow Zelle transfers of anywhere between $2500 to $5000 a day.

Actually you're both right. The last 3 banks I've had have had the $500 limit because if your bank doesn't 'natively' support zelle, Zelle themselves limit it to $500 per week taken via your debit card. If your bank integrates zelle, then the limit seems to be up to the bank up to the $5000 or whatever you quoted.

This can be a major problem, because some landlords only take their rent by Zelle and if you accidently zelle someone at the wrong time and your whole household runs out of Zelle limits you're fucked for paying the rent.

My bank put a Zelle limit of $5,000 per day and $40,000 per month on my account. I didn't ask for it and am a nobody at that bank.

Zelle is weird, you can't actually directly transfer account to account. You transfer to a person's phone number or email, so each person can only have 1 Zelle enabled account. Also people aren't automatically enrolled, you have to enable Zelle. And email/phone is really easy to make a typo. Routing and Acc number are easy to typo too, but hopefully any FedNow based services will handle that automatically.

imo Zelle has a horrible user experience. I tried paying my rent with Zelle at one place and it showed up as "pending" for 6 days. On the 7th, the payment failed and I had to call a phone number to find out why: The recipient was not signed up for Zelle. Or more likely he had signed up, but became unenrolled somehow.

... Really? You couldn't figure that out any sooner? ACH or a paper check would have been faster.

Maybe they've ironed out the kinks these days, but I'm sure Zelle would have been bigger news if it worked well from the start.

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