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Comment by culturestate | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that immediately-settled electronic transfers were Zelle’s raison d'être. I understand that it’s not universally available, but still.

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You're not using "immediately settled" in the same way as the parent.

Zelle transactions are subject to reversion or cancellation ... for days?

Compare to, say, settlement cycles in SWIFT: https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/preparing-t1-global-i...

I'm using "settled" in the colloquial "the money has been debited from the sender's account and has been credited to the receiver's account" sense, which for the purposes of this discussion is the definition that really matters.

You can't just unilaterally reverse a Zelle payment any more than you can a SEPA transfer.

My understanding is that Zelle transfers are just settled by ACH under the hood, which is the same system that settles checks.

However there is possibly some new "real-time payment" feature of the ACH network that could be equivalent to wire settlement, but I'm not sure Zelle actually uses it.

As far as I know Zelle prefers RTP[1] for settlements and falls back to ACH only when necessary, but I'm sure there's a Zelle employee on here who can confirm one way or the other.

There's also FedNow[2] but I don't know of any retail implementations yet.

1. https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp

2. https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow

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