Correct me if this is wrong, but I've read somewhere that Zelle gives you no recourse in the event of fraudulent transfers. This makes me extremely reticent to use it, or even use a bank that provides access to it without a signup process.
Prey tell, if you use cash, what recourse do you have in the event of fraudulent transfers?
Does that also mean you refuse to use banks that provide cash ?
Yes, it is literally the case that you will be fully reimbursed (after a $50 maximum) in the event of cash fraud, and that is one of the things that makes banking in America so powerful and safe. See for example, consumerfinance.gov:
> Let’s say you lost your debit card or PIN or either was stolen. If you notify your bank or credit union within two business days of discovering the loss or theft of the card, the bank or credit union can’t hold you responsible for more than the amount of any unauthorized transactions or $50, whichever is less.
> If an unauthorized transaction appears on your statement, but you did not lose your card, security code, or PIN or had any of them stolen, you should still notify your bank or credit union right away. At the latest, you must notify your bank within 60 days after your bank or credit union sends your statement showing the unauthorized transaction. If you wait longer, you could have to pay the full amount of any transactions that occurred after the 60-day period and before you notify your bank. In order to hold you responsible for those transactions, your bank would have to show that if you notified them before the end of the 60-day period, the transactions would not have occurred.
Roughly speaking, you can only be held accountable for withdrawals, transactions, and transfers from your account that you actually authorized. Any other cash transaction is fraud, and will result in you getting your money back. This is why banks are careful not to allow transactions that they suspect to be fraudulent.
:) . it’s quite a jump you took from cash to debit card .
You give me $50 in cold card cash . I run away . And you are telling me your bank is on the hook for that $50?
Both of those suck hugely vs Asian bank apps. You can just quickly and instantly send money by entering somebodies phone number. And it’s built into all the banking apps.
Could you elaborate? I've used Zelle in the exact way you've mentioned previously (entered a phone number and an amount to send straight from my bank app) with no issues.
Zelle was a consortium of the biggest US banks. It works fine if you have a deposit account at one of those institutions, or if you have created a Zelle account that lets them get you funds through a shim if your bank isn't a member participant of Zelle. If you're at a brokerage that doesn't support it, a credit union, or a community bank, your experience is meh or non existent.
FedNow is native real time messaging plumbing, so all deposit accounts can support it once you plug into FedNow (which is run at cost by the Fed). We should theoretically arrive at an experience similar to UPI, PIX, and other instant payment systems where you can use phone numbers, email, or QR codes to facilitate payments over the next 1-3 years.
Plenty of credit unions like BECU and First Tech fully support Zelle for sending and receiving payments, some credit unions even have higher daily and weekly Zelle limits than the traditional banks.
In the US I just iMessage money to people. Doesn’t work for Android, sure, but I know very few people still using Android and for them we just use Venmo.
So how do I text someone money bank-to-bank? How do I give someone money who doesn't have a bank account? I do this today with iMessage. And it's not a 3rd party app.
But it's not intended for business payments like Stripe or PayPal, or Venmo for business.
[1] https://www.zellepay.com/get-started