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Zelle Payment App No Longer Offers Person-to-person Money Transfers - USA TODAY

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Zelle Is Shutting Down Its App, But You Probably Don't Need To Worry

Zelle is shutting down its stand-alone app on Tuesday, according to a company blog post.

This news might be alarming if you're one of the over 150 million customers in the U.S. Who use Zelle for person-to-person payments. But only about 2% of transactions take place via Zelle's app, which is why the company is discontinuing its stand-alone app.

Most consumers access Zelle via their bank, which then allows them to send money to their phone contacts. Zelle users who relied on the stand-alone app will have to re-enroll in the service through another financial institution.

Given the small user base of the Zelle app, it makes sense why the company would decide to get rid of it — maintaining an app takes time and money, especially one where people's financial information is involved.

Zelle launched in 2017 with backing from 30 banks to be a more efficient alternative to Venmo. On Venmo, users can receive payments into their own Venmo wallet, which they can then deposit into their actual bank account — but if you don't want to wait a few days for the deposit to process, you'll have to pay a fee for an instant transfer. Because of Zelle's connections with banks, it's able to offer instant transfers without charging additional fees.

Zelle said that in 2024, users sent $1 trillion in payments, breaking the record of any other payment app. This might be the case because consumers tend to use Zelle for larger payments like rent. Venmo, on the other hand, is designed for more social use, like reimbursing a friend for dinner.

Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. In English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.

Send tips through Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to @amanda.100. For anything else, email amanda@techcrunch.Com.

Zelle App Shuts Down. Here's How To Keep Using The Payment Service - CNN

New York CNN  — 

Zelle, the popular person-to-person money transferring service, shut down its standalone app Tuesday — but the service itself is not disappearing.

Zelle had warned of the shutdown last year, explaining in an announcement that only 2% of transactions happen on its app. A "vast majority" of Zelle's 151 million users now access the service through their own bank's website or app, and that process will be unaffected.

Affected users who used the Zelle app "should have received messaging about this change through various emails and in-app notifications," before this week's shutdown, Zelle said in its announcement. Those users must will re-enroll through their participating bank or credit union app to keep using Zelle's services.

Zelle launched in 2017 and was created by about 30 banks to rival popular existing payments apps like Venmo, Cash App and Apple Pay.

At that time, Zelle created its own app to provide access for people whose banks didn't yet participate. But adoption has soared over the past eight years, with more than 2,200 banks and credit unions using Zelle.

Zelle users sent more than $1 trillion in 2024, making it the "most money ever sent by a person-to-person payments service in a single year," Zelle said in a press release.

The growth of Zelle since 2017 is a "testament to the valuable role the service plays and the national consumer demand for a way to send and receive funds from people they know and trust directly from their insured and regulated bank accounts," the company said.

But the app was sued by former President Joe Biden's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year against three of the country's largest banks and the operator of Zelle "for allowing fraud to fester" on the service.

The CFPB alleged that, as a result, hundreds of thousands of customers of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo have lost more than $870 million since Zelle launched seven years ago. (Zelle said the complaint was "meritless.")

The lawsuit was dropped in March amid broader changes at the CFPB ordered by President Donald Trump.

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