Until now it's only been possible for third-party financial applications to provide a simple read-only view of a bank account, but we believe in order to provide the most value and utility for end-users, applications must be able to move money too. So that's why today we're excited to announce the next step in our journey towards that goal: real-time payment APIs.

These new APIs are built on top of the Zelle network, a real-time P2P network connecting over 1120 banks in the United States, and allow your application to push money directly from a user's bank account to another US bank account, with the money arriving in the beneficiary's account in seconds.

Making a payment is one simple API call and the funds arrive in the beneficiary account instantly.

While we expect many new use cases to emerge from the availability of these new APIs, one of the most obvious immediate use cases that we are most excited about is replacing ACH. ACH is commonly used for high-value and recurring payments, and is preferred by many businesses because payment cost is fixed, rather than being a percentage of the payment's value, as well as being cheaper than plastic card payments. Despite appearing cheaper, ACH has many hidden costs that can quickly add up:

Because our payment APIs are real-time you will know instantly whether or not the payment succeeded or not. And because Zelle has no chargeback or reversal mechanisms, payments are one-way and irreversible, eliminating an entire category of fraud and counterparty risk. Finally, no expensive or time-consuming account detail verification is required.

Instead of pulling money from the user's account by submitting an ACH batch file to your bank, you can directly push it from the user's account to your by asking the user to connect the account to your application with Teller.

The flow looks like this:

zelle Pay $100 to Widgets Inc Pay PAY $100.00 to payments@you.com 🏦

Our payments APIs are available today and currently supported by our Chase, Bank of America, Citi, and Capital One integrations with support for the rest of our integrations arriving in the coming weeks.

We can't wait to see what you build.

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