With Daniel Lippman
PNC ADDED LOBBYING FIREPOWER AMID ZELLE SCRUTINY: PNC drastically expanded its lobbying footprint and boosted its spending on federal lobbying last quarter amid increased scrutiny in Washington of Zelle, the payments app owned by a consortium of banks including PNC, disclosures filed last week show.
— In early September, disclosures show PNC retained Mat Lapinski, Jason Gleason, Ben McMakin, Todd Weiss and Salim Alameddin of Crossroads Strategies and Ashley Davis, Chris Buki, Craig Kalkut, Malloy McDaniel, Kristi Remington and Shimmy Stein of West Front Strategies to lobby on bank regulatory and payment issues and general financial services issues, respectively.
— Crossroads and West Front are the first outside firms lobbying for the bank since 2014, according to disclosures. PNC also nearly doubled its lobbying spending last quarter compared with what it reported spending from April through June. The bank spent $110,000 during that period but dropped $200,000 from July through September — only about $20,000 of which went to one of PNC’s new lobbying firms. PNC’s third quarter spending was up eight-fold over what it spent on lobbying through the first three months of this year.
— The spending increases correlate to complaints from lawmakers and regulators about rates of fraud and scams on peer-to-peer payment systems like Zelle, PayPal and Venmo, the use of which has soared since the pandemic. Zelle, which is owned jointly by PNC, Bank of…