Venezuela, in the depths of a financial crisis, has seen usage of P2P payments app Zelle, owned by seven US banks, surge as people turn to USD for transactions
When Federico Suárez made an overnight trip to Valencia last month to visit his boyfriend, the 24-year-old Caracas-based lawyer was in the mood to splurge. Tweets: @bw , @gilmanhill , @tr401 , @bw , @scott_harkey , and @pattylaya Tweets: @bw : PayPal and Venmo may have achieved the status of verbs in the U.S., but in Venezuela, it's Zelle—or “Zell-ey”—that's on everyone's lips. Zelle now accounts for about 17% of all transactions in Caracas, providing relief from runaway inflation https://www.bloomberg.com/... Jenny VL Harrington / @gilmanhill : Guess who makes Zelle? $FISV at 20x, huge fcf - fraction of the multiples of $SQ & $PYPL - yes yes different businesses. But profits matter. https://twitter.com/... Tyrone V. Ross Jr / @tr401 : A few things here: -The $600B remittance market continues to be disrupted. - Zelle, @CashApp and Venmo helps the underbanked similarly right here in the U.S. -It will come up, so yes, Bitcoin is still superior. This article makes that case well. https://www.bloomberg.com/... @bw : Zelle is turning Venezuela into testing grounds for a cashless society https://www.bloomberg.com/... Scott Harkey / @scott_harkey : I like to think I know a lot about @Zelle, but this story blew my mind. Zelle is huge in Venezuela? Amazing “Across Caracas, homemade signs that read Aceptamos Zelle (We accept Zelle) dangle in store windows and off produce stands.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... Patricia Laya / @pattylaya : In Venezuela, money transfer services are enabling what may be the world's first digital dollarization: https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Zelle was built by a consortium of US banks as a domestic answer to Venmo — embedded in member banks' apps since its 2017 launch and scaling to $1T in 2024 payment volume on the strength of US users. Venezuela's crisis is repurposing that rail: with the bolívar in runaway inflation, Caracas residents are adopting the bank-owned app as an informal dollar channel, and it now clears about 17% of the city's transactions.
The twist for the banks is that this adoption is off-book and outside their control — the same country where a digital wallet was reported converting airport tax revenue into Bitcoin to reach USD is now routing everyday commerce through a US banking consortium's network. Investor Jenny VL Harrington flags the quiet beneficiary: Fiserv ($FISV), which operates Zelle, trading at 20x with strong free cash flow.
First-order effects
- Venezuelan consumers and merchants in Caracas gain a usable USD transaction rail, with Zelle absorbing roughly a sixth of the city's payments and 'Aceptamos Zelle' signage becoming a merchant fixture.
- Fiserv, Zelle's operator, and the seven owning banks see volume and relevance grow from usage they never designed for — and bear the compliance exposure of a US payments network active inside a sanctioned economy.
Second-order effects
- The banks' consortium faces a sanctions-policy dilemma: tolerating the flows extends dollar influence, but formalizing or blocking them risks either regulatory blowback or pushing Venezuelans toward crypto channels like the Jetman Pay Bitcoin route.
- PayPal and Venmo — which achieved verb status in the US — now have a competitor whose growth story includes a dollarization market they aren't positioned in, pressuring US P2P players to think about cross-border demand they've historically ceded to crypto and informal networks.
Third-order effects
- If crisis-driven adoption keeps outpacing formal policy, US-owned P2P rails become de facto dollarization infrastructure abroad, forcing Washington to choose between the reach of private payment networks and the integrity of its sanctions regime.
- Zelle's trajectory — $75B in 2017 volume to $1T by 2024 — points to P2P networks evolving from convenience apps into systemic payment utilities whose usage patterns, not their owners' plans, define their role.
The trend: US bank-owned P2P payment rails are becoming informal dollarization infrastructure in crisis economies, growing faster abroad through unofficial adoption than through their owners' domestic strategy.