Bank of America (BoA) processed 23 million transactions through Zelle’s person-to-person (P2P) mobile payment service in the final three months of 2017 – a 91 per cent year-on-year boost on the performance of its previous P2P service.

Zelle was created by a consortium of banks under the company Early Warning Services (EWS) in response to the growing popularity of P2P services such as PayPal’s Venmo. The feature launched within existing banking apps in June 2017, with a standalone app added in September.

In a statement hailing the impact of Zelle on its mobile offering, BoA revealed it has 3 million active Zelle users on its network and is adding to this at a rate of “thousands per day”.

BoA is one of the founding members of EWS and was one of the launch banks for its in-app version. Prior to its official availability, BoA had offered an unbranded, limited, P2P service.

The in-app version of Zelle allows existing customers of 50 partner banks to transfer money to accounts held at other financial institutions using a feature built into each bank’s app. It can transfer money using mobile phone numbers or email addresses as an identifier.

BoA head of enterprise payments Mark Monaco said: “We’re excited to see the overwhelming growth, as customers increasingly turn to mobile payments that are fast, safe and easy”.