Zelle is run by a consortium of US banks. Just like Visa or Mastercard is. It is not run by the government. When you say “Interac is run by the Canadian banking system” do you mean the industry, like Zelle, or do you mean the government regulator or the Canadian central bank?
The only signup required to use Zelle is to inform your bank what your email and / or phone number is. Otherwise they’d have no reason to know those two tidbits of info.
Where it gets more complicated is that smaller banks (of which the USA has thousands) often don’t belong to Zelle. And a sizeable fraction of the blindingly ignorant US populace refuses to do web-based banking at all, fearing it’s cesspool of insecurity, and/or a way for the evil gummint or the devil hisself, AKA George Soros, to track their whereabouts and dislodge their protective tinfoil hat.
Brief update: I used the phone to check out (twice, I forgot one item the first time) at the self-checkout section of the supermarket (so I wouldn’t hold up the line as much). It worked, but: I had to unlock the phone, then unlock the card, both times, even though it was only a couple of minutes between. Then I had to either put the phone to sleep or let it go to sleep before I could use it for anything else. The watch is easier. I guess I’ll be using that from now on, when I don’t use my card.
Update: I got the fingerprint working finally (the fingerprint reader is in the power button) and when I get the card ready to use with the fingerprint (which I hadn’t been able to do before) it doesn’t freeze the screen. But when I get the card ready to use with the PIN instead of the fingerprint, it does freeze the screen. So, that’s weird, but I can live with it now that the fingerprint works.
You should find that you don’t need to unlock the phone first. Even on the locked screen the thin little tab across the bottom of the screen should be visible that you can pull upwards to expose the Wallet screen & authenticate the card with just one fingerprint reading.
FWIW, I tried duplicating your freezing and could not. From an unlocked home screen I pull up the Wallet tab & swipe to select my desired card. Once I enter the Wallet PIN the card is live for NFC with the countdown timer running. While it’s counting down, I can still press any of the three buttons/icons across the bottom of the screen (all active apps, home, and back, respectively) to go do something else. If I wait until the 60 second countdown has elapsed, I can still push any of those 3 buttons to navigate to a different app. Likewise whether the countdown is running or finished I can push any of the controls within the Wallet app to access its other features: add a new card, see all my cards, edit my favorites, etc.
Ah, so it does. Easy to miss if someone doesn’t tell you about it. Thanks.
I suspect that if I deleted cache and files and app, and started over from installation, it might work correctly with the PIN too, but for now that’s more trouble than it’s worth.