What Banks Can Do to Make Zelle's P2P Rollout Successful

After months of carefully setting the groundwork, Early Warning Services and banks are officially making the push for Zelle, the nascent person-to-person payments network critical to the banking industry’s continued ability to dominate the $534 billion P2P market. As effective as that marketing push is, there is much that FIs can do to boost their own odds of success with Zelle. These early months will be a crucial test of aspects of the Zelle P2P experience that FIs can influence directly, not only in advertisements and website marketing, but also by improving the user experience and addressing important feature gaps. Javelin’s analysis of television and online advertising and tutorials, a top bank’s online marketing, secret shopper testing, as well as our digital scorecards for the nation’s top 28 banks reveals three areas of concern. FIs will need to address the marketing challenges, a frustrating user experience, and shortcomings in critical features in order to make the most of the opportunities Zelle presents.

Companies Mentioned: Apple, Bank of America, Chase, Early Warning Services, Fifth Third Bank, FIS, Fiserv, Google, Jack Henry, Navy Federal Credit Union, PayPal, PeoplePay, PNC Bank, Snap, Square, SunTrust, U.S. Bank, USAA, Venmo, Visa, Wells Fargo

Data related to P2P users is based on information collected in a random-sample survey of 3,000 respondents conducted online in October and November 2017. The overall margin of error is +1.74 at the 95% confidence level. The margin of error is larger for subsets.

Javelin evaluated online and mobile banking features at the nation’s 28 largest retail FIs by total deposits, excluding banks focused on investment banking. To provide a customer’s perspective, accountholders with seasoned checking and credit card accounts evaluated about 225 online features and 150 mobile app features and captured screenshots for Javelin’s evaluation. Online banking data was collected from June to August 2017, and mobile banking data was collected from June through September. All findings were reviewed and individually weighted by Javelin analysts. The weighting applied to the six categories was determined by an analysis of the factors that enhance consumer satisfaction at primary FIs.