Person-to-person (P2P) is one of the six payment domains we talk about in all of our workshops. P2P was an early domain for fintech innovation, largely because the barriers to entry were relatively low compared to some of the other payment domains. But in the world of banking, P2P is a little bit more challenging because of the open loop processing model. This is where Zelle comes in.

In this episode, Russ Jones welcomes Preston McCaskill, Chief Operating Officer for Zelle, an open loop fast payments network owned and operated by Early Warning Services that moves money directly between two bank accounts in the US.

Listen in as they discuss network’s growth into small business payments, the onboarding process for financial institutions, and Zelle’s settlement process and alias directory. They also cover expanding use cases like pilots in the bill pay domain, and Early Warning’s intent to bring the same trust, speed, and convenience of Zelle to consumer cross-border payments with stablecoins.

Episode Transcript

Russ Jones: Hello. I’m Russ Jones, a partner at Glenbrook and your host for this episode of Payments on Fire. Payments are sometimes corporate and can be very mechanical, but sometimes they can also be very personal, and nothing is more personal than person-to-person payments.

P2P is one of the six payment domains we talk about in all of our workshops. It’s also a segment of the global payments industry where the United States, quite frankly, has trailed a lot of other countries. People from around the world can’t believe how hard it is for somebody in the US to make a casual payment to a friend or reimburse their brother-in-law for football tickets.

But all that has been changing. P2P was an early domain for fintech innovation and this was largely because the barriers to entry were relatively low compared to some of the other payment domains. There’s no need in P2P, for example, to provide remittance data. There’s no reconciliation process, and importantly, there are not disputes and reversals.

If I got a birthday check from my mother for $100, I’m not concerned about her disputing that payment. And I’m certainly not worried about going into arbitration with my mother. So there are a lot of things in payments that you just don’t worry about when you’re working in P2P.

Some of the early fintech apps like Venmo and Cash App saw this and tackled the P2P opportunity head-on, largely enabled by new innovations like smartphones and the idea that your mobile number is your payment address, not your bank routing information and not your account number, but your mobile phone number.

But in the world of banking, P2P is a little bit more challenging because of the open loop processing model. Unlike Venmo and Cash App, bank-based payments are usually based on an open loop five-party model made up of two end users, their respective banks, and a payment network in the middle. This is where Zelle comes in.

Zelle is an open loop fast payments network that moves money directly between two bank accounts in the US. My mother hits send, and I instantly have $100 in my bank account. It’s based on technology developed by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo that has now been commercialized by Early Warning Services under the Zelle brand.

Joining me today is our guest, Preston McCaskill, Chief Operating Officer at Zelle. Last year, the network handled $1.2 trillion in processing volume, and as they sometimes say, that volume didn’t just process itself. There has to be a lot of heavy lifting that goes on behind the scenes. So we’re super excited to have you joining us today.

Preston, welcome to Payments on Fire.

Preston McCaskill: Well, thanks. Happy to be here. Longtime listener and, I guess, first time guest.

Russ Jones: We’re delighted to have you with us. Before we talk about the Zelle network, one of the things we like to do on Payments on Fire is learn a bit more about our guest’s journey in the world of payments. So tell me, what got you interested in the payments industry?

Preston McCaskill: So I started my career in consulting, working with high-growth companies in both the technology and financial service industries. And that covered everything from projects that would span corporate strategy, Lean Six Sigma, supply chain projects, and even system implementations. And I think the benefit of spending my, I call ’em my formative years in consulting was, one, a comfort for operating in high-pace and high-change environments and always approaching problems from a first principles perspective.

I think that made me sort of what I give myself as a self-proclaimed moniker, a jack-of-all-trades background. Given that so much of my client consulting experience had been tech and financial services, it made sense that the second act of my career was really focused on leading fintech and banking organizations.

That included taking leadership roles where I’ve driven initiatives like bank charter acquisitions, launching deposit products, and banking-as-a-service capabilities, and more generally, just helping organizations grow and scale in what are fast-moving and highly regulated markets. Today, I get the opportunity to serve as our head of operations and COO for Zelle, as part of Early Warning, and I get to focus on enabling our business to continue that high rate of growth and our use case expansion. I get the privilege of leading some pretty amazing teams, spanning our customer and business operations teams, as well as program management and our analytics and user research teams.

Russ Jones: I think the growth story has been a pretty impressive with Zelle, by any definition. I think people would consider Zelle one of the big payment industry success stories in the US in the last decade or so. So I mentioned the $1.2 trillion in transfer volume. Where are you guys now in the size of the network and number of users and things like that?

Preston McCaskill: Yeah. So I won’t take credit for everything. Maybe I’ll start back in 2024 when I joined the team here, and that was the first year that we eclipsed a trillion in total payment volume.

Russ Jones: So we have Zelle before Preston and after Preston.

Preston McCaskill: Yeah, I can only proclaim contribution from after Preston. But since then we’ve grown over 20% year over year. So that 2024 year, we eclipsed a trillion in payment volume. And then in 2025, let’s see, we had 4.2 billion transactions, and so that was over 1.2 trillion in total payment volume.

And often what I say, inside Zelle is it can get a little hard to wrap your head around numbers when you’re talking in the trillions. But if you start to break that down on a daily basis, it averages out to about $3.4 billion in total money movement every day. The other really important and worthy milestone was last December, and it was in that month that we exceeded 100 million accounts completing a transaction in a month.

So basically 100 million monthly active users. Really, really exciting milestone, right? A bit of an arbitrary number, but I think it sort of speaks to the scale and impact that Zelle has on a network level.

Russ Jones: That’s a big number, a hundred million active accounts. And the banking industry is famous for thinking in terms of households. How does that map into the world of Zelle? Do you have like husband and wife with a shared bank account? How do you think about that from a metrics point of view?

Preston McCaskill: Yeah. So interestingly, we see some of the users that have, we’ll call it family-to-family payments, are some of the most active and sort of super users on our network. Really the origin of Zelle is to pay people you know and trust.

And so we highly encourage, in fact, it’s sort of become the default that the first and best transaction is to a loved one, to a child needing help at college. And that becomes the sort of catalyst use case that builds trust and expands to multiple use cases. So now I send money to my son, I see it works, I see it move quickly. Now I have a level of trust to pay my hairdresser, to pay a gardener, et cetera.

And we see the network expand in those ways. That really sets a foundation that builds trust on the Zelle network and allows users to grow and expand into additional use cases.

Russ Jones: When I think about how I use Zelle, there’s plenty of times where I’m sending it to someone and I can literally see them, you know? It’s someone doing landscaping work or someone cutting your hair. Plenty of examples like that.

Preston McCaskill: Yeah. And I think those examples are probably the more compelling stories, particularly when we think about what we’re seeing on the network from a small business perspective. So we talked about that 1.2 trillion in total payment volume. Nearly thirty percent of that volume are to and from small businesses.

And it’s actually– So it’s the fastest-growing use case on Zelle. So over 26 percent, year over year. The other really cool thing for me is, I mentioned earlier, I have the privilege of leading our analytics and our user research teams. And so one, that obviously helps me sort of stay close to some of the numbers and the growth rates.

But again, to try and personalize it, we also get an opportunity to interview and speak to a lot of our everyday users, whether they be consumers or small businesses. And so I think, Russ, to the point you’re making, we have heard similar stories, right?

We spoke to a woman, Carrie, in New York, and she was sharing with us how for her, using Zelle, it’s so quick, it’s so easy, and she sends money directly to her family members when they need support. We spoke to Natasha in Texas, and she similarly is taking care of family members and needs to send that money instantaneously. And the same thing happens on the small business side.

We spoke to a small business owner, Sean, in North Carolina, and he is a travel agency, actually has a couple businesses. But his ability to access his funds and lock in rates for his clients for travel instantaneously is really the thing that is keeping his business moving forward.

And then last, just here in California, where I’m based, we spoke to an interior designer and business owner, and she shared with us that she’s using Zelle in part because of its connection to the banks. Whether that be the large financial institutions or the 2400 and counting financial institutions. That transparency in the process is what gave her the confidence to know that she could move money quickly and save time and money in her business.

Russ Jones: Just a little anecdote of my personal experience, and this is maybe a bit of a arc of the payments industry type of thing. I had Kim, who used to cut my hair forever, she only accepted cash.

Preston McCaskill: Right

Russ Jones: And I kept on telling her, “Kim, you know, you’re just killing yourself,” because it– I was thinking to myself, “Yeah, okay, I gotta go get some cash because I’m gonna get my hair cut.”

And how much she got tipped was a function of how much cash I had in my pocket. So I would tell her, “Kim, if you would just accept cards, your tips would just explode ’cause people would be happy to tip you.” They don’t have cash. They don’t have enough cash, you know?

So finally she started accepting cards, and I asked her if it worked the way I had described. And she said, “Well, the thing you didn’t tell me was that the real hidden power was I didn’t have to go to the bank anymore to deposit the cash. You didn’t tell me the cash would show up in my bank account automatically.” So I thought, “Okay, I’ve done my job for the payments industry.”

And then, couple years later, during the pandemic, I was getting my hair cut in my front yard, and I pulled out my card and she says, “Oh, no, I don’t take cards. I want you to Zelle me.”

Preston McCaskill: That’s great.

Russ Jones: So a big part of the Zelle, and what sets Zelle apart from other payment networks that are also working in the instant P2P space is bank account to bank account. So what’s involved with a bank… first of all, how big is the Zelle network now, and what’s involved for a bank to join the network or a financial institution, I should say, to join the network?

Preston McCaskill: So today, Zelle is widely available across financial institutions of all sizes, and we continue to expand that access. Today, we’ve got over 2400 banks and credit unions on the network. But I think maybe most important is that 95 percent of those financial institutions in the Zelle network are actually community banks and credit unions.

And so if we look just back at last year in 2025, I think it was 97 percent of new financial institutions that went live or signed on the Zelle network were those community banks and credit unions with under ten billion in assets. And that growth there alone represents about thirteen million incremental bank and credit union accounts that are now eligible to use Zelle.

And so you asked sort of what do you have to do? One of the ways, and we have a longstanding relationship with a number of resellers, and so that includes Fiserv, FIS, and Jack Henry. And these are all institutions that help integrate Zelle through an FI’s existing technology infrastructure and really helps accelerate that onboarding process, which can be done in just a couple of weeks.

We also have some newer reseller partnerships and collaborations. One is with Velera and the other is with Alacrity. And again, those are just continuing to help us to expand the Zelle network to reach more financial institutions.

Russ Jones: I was gonna ask you about sort of what we at Glenbrook think of as new age processors. Fiserv, Jack Henry, FIS, they’re like your dad’s processor. So they’ve been doing what they do very well for a very long time, and there’s a whole new generation of processors out there that are up-and-coming and scrappy and very modern in their approach to things.

Preston McCaskill: Yeah, and I think our approach is to try and meet financial institutions where they are. And so I think it’s through both those existing and new partnerships that Zelle puts itself in a position to support financial institutions regardless of their technology deployment model or technology environment, and help streamline that onboarding and implementation process and still maintain what is always most important, right, is security, reliability, and the highest levels of consumer protection standards.

Russ Jones: Okay. So when a financial institution joins the network, are the hurdles… When you think about the elapsed time it takes, are the hurdles on the business side or on the technical side, I’m wondering, I guess?

Preston McCaskill: Given the vast majority of the financial institutions on the network come through our resellers, we’ve done this a couple of hundred, now a few thousand times. And so that process end-to-end, like I mentioned, is maybe on average only about a three-week process. So we try and streamline that process.

Obviously, there’s a front-end piece that we’re not involved in around the underlying financial institution working with one of their resellers to get themselves access and obviously there’s commercial arrangements that we’re not a part of. But once it comes to that technology onboarding process, we have that pretty well streamlined through a tried and true process that we’ve worked with resellers now for a number of years.

Russ Jones: Okay. When think of Zelle, I kind of think of it in the world of person-to-person payments, and you’re talking about small businesses. And I sort of know from experience, I guess, that a lot of P2P systems reach out into the world of small business kind of from the point of view that a small business is really just run by a person.

And our research shows that small businesses oftentimes manage their finances the same way individuals manage their finance. So what are all the use cases that are addressed by Zelle now?

Preston McCaskill: So obviously, as you mentioned, P2P is that flagship use case. I also mentioned, right, the small businesses is the fastest-growing use case on the network. It’s worth highlighting also that when you think about the Zelle small business use case, it is both to receive payments but also send payments.

And you go beyond P2P and small business, we’ve done a number of interesting things over the last couple of months. So the first one I wanna talk about is just last month, in April, we announced a partnership with Truist on bill pay. So this is a pilot we’re doing to evaluate Zelle for bill payments.

We’re working really closely with our partners at Truist, and we’re currently working and doing our early testing ahead of what will be broader consumer availability. And what’s really great about this opportunity is it helps us understand how consumers can use Zelle to pay recurring credit card bills.

Russ Jones: Uh-huh

Preston McCaskill: Beyond that, it gives us the potential to understand how Zelle could be used for any type of bill pay product, whether that be rent or utilities, mobile phone bills, auto payments, with the payments going directly to the biller. The value that that unlocks both to the consumers as well as the billers because it delivers what Zelle offers best: speed, security, and just greater predictability, which whether you are a consumer trying to reduce uncertainty or you’re a biller trying to improve cash flow or reconciliation, it’s the top-of-the-list need for those end users.

Russ Jones: Our view at Glenbrook has always been that bill pay was probably the one of the sweet spots for fast payment systems, for consumers, for consumer-based fast payment systems. And the rationale’s always been that people are so sensitive to cash flow, and all the research shows that people pay bills when they have the money to pay bills.

And the traditional bill pay world has been sort of like, pay your bills five to seven days ahead of time because who knows when the funds will arrive, right? And the idea that you can have instant bill payments when you have the money, oftentimes at the last minute, that’s a pretty powerful value proposition to a consumer.

Preston McCaskill: Consumer or small business, right? They open that checking account and they’re looking at that balance, and sometimes they’re doing that mental math of, am I waiting for something to be deposited or am I waiting for a check to clear? And they almost have to do the math in their head incremental to what their deposit account balance is actually telling them.

And again, right, like you’re saying with Zelle, because that payment happens in near real time, you’re not having to juggle and be like, “Oh, I’m still waiting for that invoice to clear or for that payment to leave the bank account.”

Russ Jones: Yeah. Is what you’re doing in that pilot sort of based upon request to pay principles?

Preston McCaskill: Yes.

Russ Jones: Okay. I mean, we’re huge fans of request to pay at Glenbrook. In fact, that should be a whole nother topic for Payments on Fire. That’s great.

Preston McCaskill: Beyond obviously this pilot and one of the products we already have is a disbursement product. And that disbursement product actually gave us some foundation capabilities to do another pilot. So in March, we announced a partnership with Bank of America to support DAFs. DAFs are donor-advised funds.

And so in this use case, we can now allow nonprofits to receive their charitable grant funding, again, in near real time. So they’re not waiting for the check at the end of the year, usually on the holidays, traveling over Christmas. And again, it builds on that existing disbursement infrastructure that Zelle already has when we facilitate corporate payments for things like insurance payouts, class action settlements, or even university stipends.

And again, right, the value unlock is speed, reliability to the Zelle charitable grant delivery mechanisms. And really what it means is funds are reaching nonprofits faster, and it allows nonprofits to focus on their mission and not worry about, “Am I gonna get that dollar in before the end of the year or before I have to make payroll?”

Russ Jones: Uh-huh. So when you’re working in the disbursement use case, I’m thinking about, you were mentioning disbursements to consumers. Does all the business needs to know is basically their email address? Is there a little bit more to it than that, or is that as simple as it is?

Preston McCaskill: Yeah. So it sort of speaks to the alias system that we have. So the Zelle alias directory is sort of the secret sauce, if you will. And I think really what’s important to understand about it is, for us at Zelle and Early Warning, like we don’t hold the user’s money. We don’t manage a bank account or a credit union account.

And so, different than other P2P platforms, money is traveling to and is held by a third party in other platforms. And then usually there’s a second transaction if you wanna move it into, say, your like FDIC insured bank account. For Zelle, I almost use the analogy, if you’re familiar with like an iPhone AirDrop.

So instead of it just being like phone to phone via your Bluetooth network, it’s bank account to bank account via the Zelle network. And so that alias directory becomes the key feature for Zelle, and it’s designed to help consumers, again, send money quickly and reliably to people that they know and trust.

And so once that transaction is initiated, the money’s moving to the other bank account, and you don’t have to worry about moving it a second time to a final destination.

Russ Jones: So there’s a way for a business to find out whether or not their target disbursement customer is in the Zelle directory, in the Zelle alias directory?

Preston McCaskill: Yeah. And actually, maybe one of the other things that we added as a feature last year, starting with small businesses, is what we call Zelle Tag. So Zelle Tag is a feature that allows small businesses to claim a custom handle. So think of it as like, Glenbrook Payments. And it allows you with that handle to drop payments straight into a business’s, eligible bank or credit union account.

And in this case, then you don’t need to look up an email address or a mobile phone number from the sender’s perspective. And since we’ve rolled this out last August, seen a tremendous response from small businesses. So over half of all newly enrolled small businesses are currently leveraging the Zelle Tag feature.

Russ Jones: Note to self, we need get a Zelle tag on Glenbrook.

Preston McCaskill: Yeah. And like I said, right, our small businesses are using Zelle both to send and receive payments, and so that includes Zelle to manage payroll, micro payroll, small business owners with maybe four or five employees being able to send payroll. It allows you to pay vendors. So today we have 8 million small business accounts enrolled on the Zelle network, and that’s a part of the overall over 160 million accounts enrolled in the network, that is both consumer and small business.

Russ Jones: Okay. One of the things I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to maybe describe the settlement process that’s behind Zelle. It’s just sort of unique in the sense that there’s multiple settlement rails.

I shouldn’t say it’s unique. There are other payment networks that have multiple settlement rails, but it sort of stands out as part of the real interesting part of how the network operates, I think.

Preston McCaskill: Yeah. And again, right, that’s almost that secret sauce. So one, the alias directory allows us to know both the sender and the receiver and make that frictionless identification process, really enjoyable. The second secret sauce is, right, we’re not moving the money. We’re providing the messaging between the sending institution and the financial institution.

And by being part of the network, you are agreeing that those funds will settle in near instant time. How the money moves in the background and on other rails is associated but not directed or under the control of Early Warning or the Zelle Network.

Russ Jones: Okay, so you’re using ACH, right, and RTP to do the settlement process?

Preston McCaskill: Exactly.

Russ Jones: Okay. Any plans to add FedNow into that mix?

Preston McCaskill: Our goal is to grow the network, and if that grows the network, we’re agnostic.

Russ Jones: Okay. You’ve never met a settlement rail you didn’t like.

And I’m just gonna mention this for our listeners. Occasionally you’ll hear people in the payments industry sort of poo-poo payment systems that don’t manage their own settlement process. And a lot of payment networks don’t manage their own settlement process. They use other settlement rails.

One that comes to mind that I think is a legitimate payment system is the card system that uses the wire system and the ACH system to actually manage the settlement between issuers and acquirers. So, lot of precedent there for that approach.

Preston McCaskill: And likewise, if you look abroad in Europe, right, you sort of distinguish between what you might call a payment scheme and a payment processor.

Russ Jones: Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Preston McCaskill: Right. And so not to get too technical, but right, the difference between a scheme and a network is both set the rules, but it’s really only the network that then is also facilitating that authorization, clearing, and settlement that you sort of see in your example of like a card network processor.

Russ Jones: Right. One of the things that I just caught last year in the news was, Early Warning was talking about, like every company in the payment industry was talking about, stablecoins. And I was thinking to myself, actually, we’re to the point now where, you know, you go to work in the morning, you have to show your badge to get into the building.

If you’re a payments company and you wanna walk into the industry, you need to, like, announce your stablecoin strategy. You can’t be in the industry these days without a stablecoin strategy. You have any color to add about stablecoins in the Zelle network or-

Preston McCaskill: Yeah, absolutely. And as you said, like lots of exciting stuff happening in that space. And so last year, we made an announcement of our intent to go international and to do that through stablecoin. We’ll obviously have a lot more to share in the future, but what I can share, right, is that stablecoins are gaining traction because they are addressing a persistent friction in the system.

And that friction is that we don’t have simple and secure cross-border money exchange today. And stablecoins are addressing that friction head-on. They’re doing it with near instant settlement and at least traditionally lower fees, and that helps both consumers and small businesses, who are increasingly expecting that near time settlement and those lower fees.

At the end of the day, what we are trying to do is bring that same trust, speed, and convenience of Zelle to that consumer cross-border payment need and build on what we’ve been fortunate to have learned from in our market here in the US, all of our users, as well as our network of banks and credit unions.

So super excited in this space and obviously a lot more to come from us.

Russ Jones: All right. Preston, thank you for joining us on this podcast. I hope that all of our listeners have learned a little bit more about Zelle and broadened their perspective on some of the challenges that were faced building out the Zelle network. So thank you so much for spending time with us on this episode.

Preston McCaskill: Thank you for having me.

Russ Jones: And to all of you listening, thank you again for joining us, and until next time, keep up the good work. Bye for now.