Early Warning Services aims to make inroads with the largest U.S. merchants for its Paze wallet over the next three years after the company revamped its product strategy last year.
Paze is trying to establish a two-sided network with consumers and merchants that embed the digital wallet into their checkout path, much like rival offerings from Apple Pay and PayPal Holdings. Paze’s immediate focus will be on adding the 100 largest U.S. merchants, Early Warning CEO Cameron Fowler said in an interview.
“We’re interested in habituation of high-volume transactions right now,” Fowler said of Paze’s goals, speaking Monday in a hotel suite EWS used for meetings during the Money20/20 financial technology conference this week in Las Vegas.
A Paze spokesperson had no immediate comment on how many of the top 100 merchants the company has so far.
Early Warning Services is a consortium owned by seven large U.S. banks, including Bank of America, Capital One Financial and JPMorgan Chase. It also operates the Zelle payments system for bank transfers and Certos, a fraud-prevention and identity risk provider.
Paze has endured a choppy path over the past three years, with slow adoption.
Serge Elkiner, a former product executive at Visa, joined Early Warning as Paze general manager in October 2024 as part of EWS’s effort to revitalize the project. Elkiner said he realized within a month of joining EWS that the wallet needed a massive overhaul, he said Tuesday in an interview at the conference.
“It was not ready for prime time,” Elkiner said Tuesday, sitting near Paze’s booth on the Money20/20 exhibition floor. The initial Paze wallet had low conversion and approval rates, he said. It was also “not that easy to use because there were too many screens, so we went back to the whiteboard” in May 2025, with a one-year schedule to revamp the wallet, Elkiner said.
Various development milestones were promising during that period, but at the 12-month mark Paze’s conversion and approval rates still weren’t suitable, Elkiner said.
“The power of the consortium is that we can go all the way up to the CEOs if we need to, and we had a heart-to-heart with all the banks, and we said, ‘Guys, we have six weeks because we’re launching 15th of June, and we need to do it, and we need to get the approval rates’” improved, he said. That process also involved working with the major card networks, including Visa and Mastercard, Elkiner added.
To drive Paze usage, the company launched its “It Checks Out” marketing campaign in June, with Hollywood actors Elizabeth Banks and Gabrielle Union playing on their last names to highlight the wallet’s security due to its close ties to banks and credit unions.
Over the summer, Paze also offered a $10 credit for people who activated Paze on their debit or credit cards and spent at least $10, with the free money allowed for up to 10 transactions per card at specific merchants. Those “Paze craze” deals led people to strategize how to maximize their financial return, with some amassing more than $1,000, Bloomberg reported. The promotion ended Sept. 11.
Paze declined to disclose how much it has spent on the marketing efforts. Elkiner said the company will continue investing on efforts that can expand Paze usage.
“The growth was insane,” Elkiner said of the summer promotional period, with Paze acquiring “a few percentage points of wallet share” in three to six weeks at its merchants due to the free money. “We’re giving money, but we see it works. We see the product is performing, and the performance was really high. We became, at some of our merchants, (the) highest approval rate wallet of all wallets, and that was unheard of. And so the numbers moved.”
Digital wallet competitors include behemoths Apple and PayPal Holdings, along with an upstart in Stripe’s Link, and Android-based wallets from Google and Samsung.
Large merchants that accept Paze include the department store Bloomingdale’s and cosmetics chain Sephora; as well as Dunkin’, the coffee and baked goods chain; and United Airlines.
Paze declined to disclose financial or operating targets for the wallet, but Elkiner said Paze is on track to exceed its 2026 goal for transactions by four times the target.
Paze is targeting a specific group of consumers: Those who aren’t tied to Apple’s ecosystem, people not committed to any particular wallet, and those who trust their bank as a more secure payment provider, Fowler and Elkiner said. That consumer bloc represents 30% to 50% of the market, Fowler said.
Paze has added about 220 million credit and debit cards to the tool, the company said last month in a press release.
Paze is also spending significantly on sports-oriented marketing, adding its logo last month to the Phoenix Suns’ professional basketball team’s jersey – supplanting rival PayPal in that spot. Paze is already aligned with the Atlanta Hawks basketball team jerseys. It also has announced plans to be a founding partner of Etihad Park in Queens, New York, where soccer club New York City FC will play starting in July 2027.
Paze touts its bank connections as a source of security and notes that it doesn’t share 16-digit card data with merchants, instead tokenizing the information that’s used for payments.
Over time, Paze aims to leverage its reputation as a secure brand backed by banks for people to navigate digital commerce, and avoid sharing data with dozens of websites and wallets, Elkiner said. “The way I look at it is, today I'm a wallet. Tomorrow I'm the access to your secure credential,” he said.