Zelle Will Overtake Venmo in 2018

It may be one of the newest services for transferring money to a friend via smartphone, but Zelle has quickly surpassed the competition to become the most used peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payment platform in the US.

According to our latest US mobile payment forecast, Zelle will overtake Venmo in 2018.

“Zelle, a P2P service made up of a network of 30 US banks, has catapulted itself to the top of mobile P2P payments, rivaling more established apps such as Venmo,” said eMarketer forecasting analyst Cindy Liu. “One of the main hurdles new apps face is building trust and a sizable audience. But Zelle has leapfrogged the early stages of adoption by having the benefit of being embedded into the already existing apps of participating banks.”

Zelle will grow by more than 73% this year to reach 27.4 million users in the US, putting it slightly ahead of Venmo's 22.9 million users.

Meanwhile, Square Cash will round out the top three with 9.5 million users.

This year, the total number of P2P mobile payment users in the US will grow nearly 30% to reach 82.5 million people. That equates to 40.5% of US smartphone users.

The total transaction value of mobile P2P payments will grow 37.0% this year to reach $167.08 billion. This figure is expected to surpass $300 billion by 2021.