Zelle Fraud Protection

Zelle presents real risks for the financial institution (FI) and their users when it comes to fraud.  It is the responsibility of the FI to protect against these risks and proactively educate its users about threats that they may face when using Zelle.  

Narmi can act as a trusted partner as the FI adopts this new tool by being informed about fraud risks and helping educate the FI about what they can do to limit those risks.

• FIs are required to communicate that Zelle does not offer protection for authorized purchases. Just like ACH, there are no purchase protections in the event a consumer authorized the payment but didn’t receive the good or service.
• Transactions initiated by the consumer that later turn out to be a scams are also not covered by Zelle. However, this does not prevent the FI from servicing their customers based on their own policies and procedures.
• Zelle’s limits are an important tool that the FI can use to protect against fraud.
• FIs have the option to enable OTP for each transaction.

JHA PayCenter

• PayCenter offers a service called “YellowHammer Faster Payments” which analyzes Zelle transactions against a pre-defined set of suspicious scenarios.
  • These scenarios are numerous (e.g. a newly enrolled Zelle user attempts to send over x% of their available balance to a recipient).
  • PayCenter offers FIs the opportunity to add their own scenarios to this list.
  • PayCenter also gives FIs the ability to block these transactions outright or create an alert for the transaction to be reviewed retroactively.