Zelle may still allow for you to send money to a non-Zelle account - as a dark pattern, they'll hold that cash for the recipient and give them an opportunity to sign up and receive it. This was a big pressure point for smaller banks and CUs to sign up.
Sure, so will all the real fintech payment companies that came before Zelle too, but you can’t count on someone to be interested in signing up. They might just say “no, screw that, I don’t like Zelle/PayPal/CashApp, I demand you pay me I with cash or check or I won’t work for you anymore.”
For all I know, they might even be banned from that app, and unable to sign up to retrieve my payment.
