[woodruffw]

It's petty of me, but I hope that FedNow utterly eradicates Zelle: I've spent my entire life in the mess that is the US's banking system, and every trouble I've ever had pales in comparison to the troubles that Zelle gives me on a near-daily basis.

[alsodumb]

I've been in the US for only a few years now, and Zelle works seamlessy for me. Granted, I think everyone I zelled had a bank account with Chase, BofA, PNC, and Wells Fargo - only the big ones.

[patch_cable]

Can you say more?

Zelle basically never worked for me at my local credit union (every single attempt to use it locked my account on suspicion of fraud), but I use it regularly with Chase with no issue.

How do you hope FedNow will improve on the concept?

[woodruffw]

Sure.

I was a Chase customer for a long time, and I tried to enroll with Zelle through Chase. This failed in two separate ways:

1. I was unable to enroll through Chase: I got everything ranging from generic error pages, to server errors, to actual Java stack traces in both my email and browser.

2. I was unable to enroll directly through Zelle's site: their site would claim that I was already enrolled, invite me to log in, and then...not log in.

It took weeks to get a combination of Chase and Zelle's customer service to (1) acknowledge the issue, and (2) diagnose it: Zelle appears to (or did) use US phone numbers as primary keys, and I was partially registered in two separate places. They didn't have a resolution available to me so I told them to delete my account entirely, which they said they did.

Fast forward about 3 years: I'm no longer a Chase customer. For unrelated reasons, I am asked to attempt to use Zelle again. I try and enroll, only to discover that:

1. Zelle can only be linked to one bank at a time;

2. Chase never actually bothered to un-enroll me.

At this point, I'm no longer a customer of Chase, and have no active account to reference. I can't log into either Chase or Zelle to "un-enroll" this account that doesn't exist, and neither is willing to do it for me. I end up convincing the person that wanted me to use Zelle that it's fundamentally broken, and ignore it.

Fast forward another year: I am now forced to use Zelle. This time, somehow, my new bank is able to enroll me. I log into Zelle to make a payment; I am instantly banned for having "insufficient personal information" (how this is possible is unclear to me; it is literally linked to all the information on my bank account). I convince my bank to talk to Zelle and unban me, and finally things mostly "work": I can enter a crappy webview within my bank's app to send money through Zelle. Except that I still have to split it into smaller payments, since Zelle uses the debit network for settlement and won't let me send very modest amounts of money in single amounts.

To summarize: after about 6 years of fighting, I can half-use Zelle by splitting already small payments into smaller payments. I have to be careful about when I split these payments, because if I do them on the wrong calendar intervals I exceed my "monthly limit" and have to wait another month to make essential payments. Getting to this state took literal dozens of phone calls with two banks and Zelle themselves.

> How do you hope FedNow will improve on the concept?

I hope none of the above will ever happen to me again.

[patch_cable]

Yeah, that sounds about right.

While I was with the credit union, the buck was just passed between them and Zelle. Zelle seems to have been set up assuming that banks will somehow support it, and either they’re not actually prepared to do it or not given the proper tools to detangle the mess.

[georgeburdell]

Same experience