Paze, the bank-owned digital wallet, wants the 100 biggest US stores

Paze, a digital wallet owned by large US banks, plans to sign up the 100 largest US merchants over the next three years. Its parent company, Early Warning Services, says the near-term goal is getting shoppers to use it at high-volume stores, the way many already use Apple Pay or PayPal.

What Paze is

A digital wallet stores your credit and debit cards so you can pay online without typing in card details. Early Warning Services is owned by seven large US banks, including Bank of America, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase. It also runs Zelle and Certos, a fraud-prevention and identity risk provider.

A rough start and a rebuild

Paze has had a choppy three years with slow adoption. Serge Elkiner, a former Visa product executive, became its general manager in October 2024. He said the early wallet "was not ready for prime time." It had weak conversion and approval rates, which are measures of how often a checkout works, and too many screens.

The redesign began in May 2025. Elkiner said the numbers still were not good enough a year later, so the banks and card networks, including Visa and Mastercard, worked to fix them before a June 15 launch.

Ads and free money

In June, Paze began its "It Checks Out" campaign with actors Elizabeth Banks and Gabrielle Union. It plays on their last names to stress security through ties to banks and credit unions. Paze has also put its logo on Phoenix Suns jerseys, replacing PayPal, and on Atlanta Hawks jerseys.

This summer, users got a $10 credit for activating Paze on a card and spending at least $10, for up to 10 transactions per card at certain merchants. Bloomberg reported that some people collected more than $1,000. The offer ended Sept. 11. Elkiner said Paze gained "a few percentage points of wallet share" at its merchants in three to six weeks.

What it means for shoppers

Paze says it does not share your 16-digit card number with merchants. It uses tokenizing, which swaps your real number for a stand-in code used for the payment. The company says it is aiming at people who are not tied to Apple, have no favorite wallet, or trust their bank most. Paze says it has added about 220 million cards. Merchants that accept it include:

• Bloomingdale's
• Sephora
• Dunkin'
• United Airlines

What is not known yet

Paze would not say how many of the top 100 merchants it has so far, how much it spent on marketing, or what its financial targets are. Elkiner said it is on track to exceed its 2026 transaction goal by four times the target. It still faces Apple, PayPal, Stripe's Link, Google and Samsung.