Zelle owner taps Fiserv to jump-start mobile wallet

Photographer: Joey Pizzolato/American Banker

Early Warnings Services wants a quick route to expand its Apple Pay rival Paze digital wallet by turning to the financial technology industry's massive distribution networks.

Early Warning, which operates the popular Zelle transfer app and the newer Paze digital waller, said this afternoon that it is  partnering with bank technology company Fiserv to expand Paze wallet beyond the immediate distribution channels provided by its seven owner banks. 

Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorganChase, PNC, Truist, US Bank and Wells Fargo own Early Warning. 

"To get to scale and to get to 100% [market penetration] we have to expand outside of our owner footprint from a merchant services standpoint, and partner with companies that support merchants," Eric Hoffman, Chief Partnerships Officer at Early Warning Services, told American Banker. 

Early Warning is hoping to take a page from the Zelle playbook as it expands beyond its owner-bank ecosystem. Fiserv is one of the largest merchant acquirers in the country and also has relationships with thousands of financial institutions to provide technology services, including payment processing and card issuing.

The partnership will enable Fiserv's enterprise and small business clients to offer and accept the Paze digital wallet. Early Warning is currently working with Fiserv to onboard a handful of enterprise merchants before the holiday shopping season, Hoffman said, but acknowledged that many large merchants have long implementation roadmaps that cause the process to take longer than expected. 

"Paze isn't going to scale overnight," he said. "Strategic partnerships with companies like Fiserv [are] a long term project. To get to critical scale, it's going to take more than 2025." 

Early Warning is also looking to roll out Paze on Fiserv's small business payments platform Clover before the end of the year. 

"That one is a little bit more straightforward, because they use a hosted pay page, which means that there's a standardization of the payment types that all merchants accept," Hoffman said. "Once they add Paze, then that portfolio will be mass enabled to tens of thousands of merchants." 

Early Warning's owner banks make up four of the five largest credit card issuers in the country – all of which are automatically enabled with Paze at issuance. And six out of the seven have merchant acquiring business lines, giving Early Warning a solid base to stand up its own e-commerce wallet. 

Still, Early Warning hopes to add more issuers to Paze, Hoffman said. "We plan on seeing five additional issuers from Fiserv supporting Paze this year." 

Solving for merchant acceptance is a "necessary step" for widespread adoption of any new payment method, said Aaron Press, a senior research analyst at IDC.  

"The way they're going to solve for the acceptance side is to make it available within the checkout pages that are controlled by the platforms and the acquirers," Press told American Banker. 

This is the second such distribution partnership that Paze entered in June. Earlier this month, Early Warning inked a deal with Worldpay to bring its checkout option to Worldpay merchants. Early Warning was also working with GoDaddy in 2023 to help drive e-commerce adoption. 

GoDaddy did not respond to a request for comment. 

But Paze's new distribution partnerships could be too-little-too-late in a market that is currently being reshaped by agentic payments, said Richard Crone, CEO and founder of Crone Consulting.  

"Paze is still walking a cow path — this is a non-event without the support of major e-commerce merchants," Crone told American Banker. "The biggest ecommerce retailers focused on agentic payments — they're racing to prepare for disintermediation from AI-powered shopping, where checkout is collapsed into intent outside the retailer's own branded platforms.

"Paze is solving for yesterday's problems while the market moves forward," he said.