After Coming ‘a Really Long Way,’ Paze Signs Sellers As It Executes a Staged Rollout

Paze, the online checkout platform backed by some of the nation’s biggest banks, is barreling through a state-by-state rollout that could culminate in nationwide coverage by late summer or early fall, according to James Anderson, the platform’s general manager who has spearheaded the project since Early Warning Services LLC announced it early last year.

“We’ve come a really long way,” he says. “We’ve built the infrastructure. People are doing live transactions. It’s working.”

Next up, he says, is an ambitious advertising campaign to raise awareness of the Paze wallet, which operates online only and lets users check out with the bank cards they’ve loaded. The campaign, which Anderson calls “the next big boulder on deck,” will “ramp up later this year” and will “explain to consumers why they should use Paze.” The campaign will be crucial. “We’ve got to make a splash,” Anderson says.

And, he adds, it will come at the direction of the financial institutions that are backing Paze, which include the seven owners of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Early Warning, operator of the Zelle nationwide peer-to-peer payment service. These banks, some of the biggest in the country, include Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. These seven, plus U.S. Bancorp’s Elan Financial Services, represent some 150 million potential cards for Paze usage. Roughly 200 other issuers are also live or in the queue, Anderson adds.

This approach, he argues, will simplify risk management. “The only way to get a wallet is from a participating [financial institution],” he says. “So we’ve got bank-grade data on all consumers. That will drive the right kind of behavior throughout the system.”

Anderson is equally optimistic about merchant response. Through agreements with payment facilitators like GoDaddy Inc., as well as gateways, independent sales organizations, and other resellers, Paze has secured 80,000 online sellers so far, including big brands like Omaha Steaks, Teleflora, and Whataburger, Anderson reports. “We’re in the middle of signing merchants,” he says. “We want tier-one merchants.”

This effort will be critical to Paze’s success, observers argue. “The merchant side … is more problematic,” notes Thad Peterson, a strategic advisor at Datos Insights, a financial-services consultancy, by email. “Merchants already have a variety of acceptance offerings, and it’s highly likely that any consumer with a Paze wallet also has other means of payment that are already available on the merchant site.  The Paze challenge is to convince merchants that accepting Paze creates opportunities for incremental revenue and sales beyond current alternatives.”

Much will now depend on the marketing campaign, which will introduce the Paze brand late this summer or early fall to consumers and, Early Warning hopes, move them to set up a wallet and use it to simplify their e-commerce activity. “We’ve got to make a splash,” Anderson says. Observers agree that “splash” will be critical. “With Paze, customer enrollment is their strength, since there’s a direct linkage to the customer’s bank account that makes for a very simple opt-in,” says Peterson.

Adoption will simplify management for Early Warning, as well. “The only way to get the wallet is from participating [banks],” says Anderson, who came to Early Warning in 2022 after a nearly 15-year career at Mastercard Inc. “So we’ve got bank-grade data on all consumers.”