Ah. While Zelle works fine, it’s fundamentally very different from SEPA instant credit.

It’s not available with all banks. Both sender and receiver have to actively sign up to Zelle. And the transfer limits are quite low.

SEPA instant credit works with all existing bank accounts in the Eurozone. You send money to someone’s IBAN which they’ve already had for decades and are accustomed to using for bank transfers. If the receiving bank doesn’t yet support instant credit, it becomes a regular bank transfer that usually clears the next banking day. (It’s like batched email delivery back in the dial-up days. As a sender, you don’t need to care if their email system does immediate or batched delivery. And of course nowadays everyone has immediate.)

The transfer limit is 100k EUR, so the same system is useful to both businesses and consumers.

I think Zelle is limited at $5k last I tried? (When I lived in New York, I tried figuring out if I can pay rent without the absurdity of paper checks. But Zelle’s limit was so low that you can’t pay a Manhattan family apartment rent with it.)