The surge in popularity for peer-to-peer payments is making itself felt in the realm of holiday gifting, helping to erode a longstanding cultural taboo against giving cash during the annual gift-giving season.
Gift transactions rose 47.2% in December 2017 over the monthly average for the previous August through October, according to numbers released this week by Fiserv Inc. for its Popmoney P2P service. The increase in November last year over the same baseline was 9.6%. The Brookfield, Wis.-based company, which also processes for the Zelle P2P network, did not track similar numbers for Zelle since the service had only started up a few months earlier.