Early Warning Services adds identity security unit Certos

• Key insights: Early Warning Services is launching its third business line, an identity and fraud company called Certos. 
• What's at stake: The bank-owned fintech has been under immense pressure to do more to combat fraud and scams on its Zelle peer-to-peer network, and is hoping to bring more public visibility to what the company says has always been its historical backbone. 
• Forward look: Early Warning estimates it stops over $3.7 billion in fraud annually, and believes that figure could rise as high as $9 billion per year once it unifies fraud signals from different payment channels. 

Early Warning Services is putting a renewed focus on fraud, scams and identity with the launch of its third business line, Certos. 

The Latin root for "certainty," Certos reflects what EWS believes is its role in securing payment networks, and comes at a time when the bank-owned fintech has been under immense pressure to do more to combat fraud and scams on its peer-to-peer network, Zelle. It's also hoping to bring more public visibility to what the company says has always been its historical backbone. 

Certos is "the foundational product of Early Warning," Ben Chance, Certos' general manager, told American Banker. "We're taking our existing product stack and we're unifying that under a common brand umbrella." 

But the effort is much more than a rebranding, Chance said, it's a shift in the company's product focus upstream, with a larger focus on identity verification. 

"Traditional transaction fraud capabilities can only stop so much fraud. We see this rise of synthetic identities and manipulated identities really being the root cause of the problem," Chance said. 

Early Warning has found itself caught in a tight spot in the last few years as lawmakers and state regulators have ratchetted up the pressure, alleging that its efforts to prevent fraud and scams fall short. The fintech, along with owners JPMorganChase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, were first sued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in December 2024, but that suit was dropped later after the Trump administration took over the bureau. New York Attorney General Letitia James later brought a similar suit in August 2025.

Early Warning has maintained that it prevents far and away more scams and fraud than gets through, but the company has had to combat an ever-changing fraud landscape where much of consumers' vulnerability to those scams sit outside of its network. Early Warning estimates that it stops $3.7 billion annually, and believes it can expand that figure to $9 billion annually with the investment into its new business line. 

"With the exponential growth and the use of Zelle to replace paper checks, [Early Warning Services] introduced a whole new vulnerability to a populace that has embraced it thinking that it's safer than a paper check, but it now has a whole new set of scams in order to hijack someone's checking account," Richard Crone, CEO of Crone Consulting, told American Banker. "The scams and hijacking and phishing that's taking place on Zelle is now being agentically exposed with AI." 

Certos' challenge in the years ahead will be to build tools and products that keep pace with fraudsters' evolving use of artificial intelligence. Real-time payment fraud, including Zelle, was identified as the top concern for 41% of bankers heading into 2026, according to American Banker research.

"[Fraudsters] are using AI tools, in particular deep fake tools, to really attack individuals in a way where they haven't been attacked before," Chance said. 

"Gone are the days of the Nigerian prince email, where you could see capitalization and punctuation errors. AI is allowing individuals all over the world to have absolutely beautiful, pristine communications that look like they are the merchant or their long lost friend from high school or their financial institution," he said. 

Certos' products currently focus on identity verification at the time of account opening and payment risk analysis at the time of money movement, and operate under a consortium model with 5,000 banks, credit unions, payment companies, merchants, and government agencies. 

Those members share data that is then anonymized and shared back with the consortium to help tell, for example, if an account is being opened with a synthetic identity or verify that a payment is going to its intended recipient.

The company operates on a cost recovery basis, Chance said, noting that the company still turns a profit and sells its technology through large technology sellers in a distribution model similar to its other two business lines, Zelle and Paze. 

Eventually, Certos wants to merge signals from different payment channels — ACH, wire, check, RTP or stablecoins — into a single data infrastructure to be able to look at fraud more holistically, Chance said. 

"Over time, Certos will play a larger and larger role in powering both the identity and payments risk capabilities in both the Zelle business and the Paze business," he said. 

But the real greenfield opportunity for Certos is in establishing itself as a unique identity layer for agentic payments that would prevent not only fraud, but also agent-to-agent purchase hallucinations and prompt-injection hijacks, according to Crone. 

"Anybody in agentic payments might use this new authentication and fraud prevention service to secure their agent-to-agent connections," Crone said. "It could be a huge market opportunity for them if it was positioned as a product that could help secure an agentic payment."