Zelle, a peer-to-peer digital money transfer platform, provides ease-of-use that boosts transactions — and fee making — for its partner banks. Is Zelle a direct P&L center? No. But the increases in transactions and fees for its member banks are traceable to Zelle digitalization. How much? Thus far in 2025, Zelle has processed more than $1.92 trillion in transactions, a 20% growth rate year over year, showing the revenue-generating potential of creating digital services for an industry that can use them.
Getting to revenue
With IT’s long history of a “back office” role, it isn’t easy for CIOs to shift their thinking to revenue generation as an outcome of their digital projects. It is also true that many digital efforts are of a back-office, operational savings nature — but it is equally true that CIOs,CEOs, and other C-level executives have tended to leave a lot on the table by failing to imagine how their digital projects could contribute to corporate revenue.
Some years ago as CIO, I lead a digital project that we transformed into a SaaS offering, with other smaller companies agreeing to pay subscription fees for our product and support services. The vision was to expand this project so that more customers could be added, possibly outside of our immediate industry sector — but the CEO preferred at that time to limit our SaaS to a handful of business clients, with a modest goal of breaking even from revenues to cover expenses.
