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Comment by sylvainkalache | Hacker News Reader

I hate Zelle; in South Florida, that's all the rage. No one wants to use Venmo or other more user-friendly apps.

I hate PayPal (Venmo). I see no reason to give an unnecessary middleman control of my funds, or see my transactions.

I hate all of them. They all let people get away with scams (just different ones), and give no shits about their customers as long as they are taking fuckloads of your money.

To be fair, a bank presumably makes no money at all (except in that it might slightly increase their non-interest-bearing checking account deposit base) from offering Zelle.

Dispute arbitration does cost money, though (especially if banks would step in to make customers whole in case fraudsters are already out of their reach), which is why we're in this mess in the first place.

Zelle's usability is entirely down to your bank's app. I've seen both atrocious and pretty usable integrations.

Other than that, Zelle has one huge advantage over the competition: The money is available in the recipient's bank account immediately. Venmo, Cash App etc. charge quite a bit of money for instant payouts.

That is what I was thinking as well - Zelle is dependent on the bank that issues it, and perhaps banks popular in some places do it better. I use Chase and the experience is fine, but for the slight friction it introduces, I prefer my bank be involved and directly receive the money.

Bank of America did not generate QR codes until very recently. Imagine having a business setup to accept payment from Zelle and then realizing you have to instruct each user how to use Zelle with their bank. A lot of the time the sale never happened, the few cases it did required 30 minutes of hand holding.

> Imagine having a business setup to accept payment from Zelle

Well, here's the problem: Zelle was never intended for this use case (i.e. B2C payments).

I believe they are planning to move into that space, but right now it's just the completely wrong tool for the task, and I've never seen it used for that myself (except for a few otherwise cash-only restaurants, food trucks etc).

I hear you. Wells Fargo did generate QR codes though. So did Chase. So even though it’s a B2C feature, plenty of C2C use cases that other banks implemented and that Bank of America eventually implemented

> Imagine having a business setup to accept payment from Zelle

Imagine having a concrete business and you bought Miatas instead of concrete mixers. Clearly Miatas are useless vehicles which serve no purpose seeing as how they can't keep a few tons of mixed concrete moving for an hour as it gets delivered.

Having a business set up to use Zelle, well, you're using the wrong tool for the job. We don't need every tool to be able to do every use case. Not every car needs to be a cement mixer.

I see you have never worked with small businesses (read someone with a Etsy store going around to individuals to make their first $100) trying to get off the ground. This post is not meant for you in that case

People hate it for the same reason it can be used for scams. It is trivially refundable to someone if they complain, even if the transaction is legitimate.

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