Zelle Shut Down Its Money-Swapping App

There was always that one person who wasn’t on Venmo, long ago forgot their PayPal password, and wasn’t using Apple Pay. “What do you have, then?” would come the puzzled look as everybody hung tight in suspense over the bar receipt or DoorDash order.

“Zelle,” they would say, and then everybody else would sink into despair, sliding off their chairs or their knees buckling as the Earth cracked open underneath them and swallowed their hopes and dreams and the rest of their afternoons.

Dramatic? Not a bit. Zelle was never particularly hard to use. It just was an afterthought’s afterthought. While the rest of us were figuring out who’s cheating on whom via Venmo’s not-always-private transaction notes, some folks were still plugging away with Zelle.

Well, that time is over, for the Zelle app was killed April 1. And no, it doesn’t appear to be an April Fool’s joke.

not much used anymore

Zelle must have a thing for making announcements on U.S. holidays, as this post from October 31, 2024 foreshadowed the app’s shutdown: “When Zelle first launched, we also created a standalone Zelle-branded app for consumers whose banks or credit unions had not yet joined the network.

“With the strong growth of adoption by banks and credit unions, we now see just ~2% of transactions on the standalone app.” According to Zelle, as of Halloween 2024 more than 2,200 financial institutions were using Zelle.

Zelle’s integration with most major banks means that you’ll continue to be able to send and receive money via Zelle through the banks’ websites and apps. It’s just that the standalone Zelle app is gone, kaput, finitio.

I can’t say that I’ll mourn it, exactly. When so few people were using the Zelle app in the way they use Venmo and PayPal, it threw a wrench into the gears of casual transactions between friends, you and your barber, and those annoying ticketed events that are “post credit card.” Ugh.