Capital One Joins ClearXchange, Giving P2P Project a Big Bump

Capital One has joined clearXchange, providing a flood of new potential end users to the bank-led person-to-person payments initiative.

Capital One will become an owner of clearXchange, joining  Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. ClearXchange has one other member, FirstBank, which has $12 billion in deposits and 115 locations in Colorado, Arizona and California.

"We now have four of the largest banks and a fantastic regional bank," says Mike Kennedy, a co-founder and CEO of ClearXchange.

Capital One is decidedly larger than FirstBank, with $297 billion in assets and more than 900 branch locations in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, DC. It's also a major payments player, holding the fourth largest credit card portfolio among U.S. banks, and has partnered with large companies such as General Motors to issue payment cards.

"We're adding a lot more endpoints and access to a lot more customers by adding Capital One," Kennedy says.

Capital One is also active in developing new payments technology. It recently partnered with PushPoint to launch a system that matches payments activity in real time with other elements of shopping such as a consumer's location in a store.

"They're an innovative bank and they share our vision for a seamless bank-focused payments network," Kennedy says. "Having partners like that will push this venture forward."

The five banks cover more than half of the addressable person-to-person payments market in the U.S., Kennedy says.

The members are in various stages of deployment. Capital One will go live with clearXchange later this year, FirstBank will go live this summer, JPMorgan Chase is incrementally deploying the product to groups of consumers, and Wells Fargo and Bank of America are already fully live.

Kennedy would not provide adoption numbers, but says the product has been well received. "We're seeing tremendous adoption in terms of actual transactions and have seen it double year over year off of a very large base," he says.

To use clearXchange, consumers provide a recipient's email address or mobile phone number to direct the payment.

Each member bank can control how clearXchange appears on its own website and mobile app. "They're the best suited to figure out the best way to reach the customers within their own apps. We do provide them with best practice ideas in terms of screen and navigation flows," Kennedy says.