Just wondering if anyone has played around with the Zelle payment portal? I need to see if a deposit was posted into the account and being able to automate the process would save me the time and trouble of having to check on a frequent bases.

My app that I would be adding this to is a WConnect backend with a Vue (JavaScript/HTML) frontend.

Best...

Are you still looking for help with this? I've done many such integrations across various languages in the past and I'm sure I'd be able to help out.

Since posting the question, I have discovered, No API exists for Zelle. It is a bank-to-bank transaction and to confirm a Zelle payment has been posted would require interfacing with my bank. The issue than becomes one of identifying the payees transaction in my account statement. This requires me to ask the payee to include an GUID in the Note section of their Zelle transfer which of course will be very prone to errors.

So if I want to allow Zelle payments and not have to manually confirm payments, I need to find another solution to the process. In the design of any solution, I need to be able to match up to 100 businesses paying through Zelle on a weekly bases and somehow be able to know who made the payment and amount of the transaction aligns with their invoice.

I am very interested in any suggestions you have about how this can be accomplished?

Normally the way you handle mapping is via PO numbers. Some identifier that is an invoice number (your's) or PO Number (theirs) that is associated with the transaction when they pay. If they just pay without association, that's a disaster waiting to happen. There should always be a transaction context associated with the payment.

As to payment methods - Zelle is not a B to B or P to P thing really - it is managed through the bank. Zelle sits on top, but it's always done through Banking apps from your actual bank.

You'll be much better off using traditional payment processors like Stripe or BrainTree which support all sorts of payment mechanisms including ACH if you want to go the bank route but it's much more of a hassle than CC or debit card processing or PayPal for that matter.

If the goal is to get around the fees, I think if you use any kind of vendor API you're going to pay and it'll all end up being somewhere around 3% for small business with negotiated rates for large customers.

Payment systems suck - there's so much grift in that system, the APIs are not bad but change often and testing is always difficult, but once set up it's pretty hands off. It's also how people online expect to pay. Fucking around with weird or partial solutions is usually not a good idea because there will always be people who won't want to or can't use that one solution. This is why something like Stripe/BrainTree is good because there are lots of options (ie. BrainTree is part of paypal, so you get direct PayPal and Venmo integration for example) and most of them support plain CC payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay etc. through a single API. PayPal and Venmo are the exception which require separate integration except for BrainTree which has it directly integrated into the pay flow as an option.

+++ Rick ---