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Paze, the online checkout service from Early Warning Services LLC, may usher in a new phase for the service in 2026. That’s the suggestion from Eric Hoffman, chief partnerships officer at EWS.
“2025 was a big year in building partnerships and we’re excited to see the fruits of those efforts,” Hoffman tells Digital Transactions News this week at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas. “2026 will see the results of that in the form of consumer transactions as we launch large national merchants.” Hoffman declined to disclose the merchants.
The partnerships include processor Nuvei Corp. adding Paze for its merchants, Payfinia, an independent payments company, to broaden Paze’s reach, and Fiserv Inc. incorporating Paze as an e-commerce checkout option for its merchants.
Paze also announced this week that Xsolla, a videogame-commerce company, has added Paze as an online checkout option.
Hoffman, who joined Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Early Warning in October last year, says the Fiserv partnership includes the issuer side, enabling Fiserv to cross-sell Paze acceptance to its financial-institution clients.
Paze, an expedited checkout service that was preloaded with 150 million credit and debit cards and billing addresses from EWS’s seven bank owners, is moving closer to 200 million cards, Hoffman says.
While Hoffman and EWS, which also provides the Zelle peer-to-peer payment service, have big ambitions for Paze, growth won’t happen instantly. Hoffman is also tapping lessons EWS learned from Zelle, its peer-to-peer payments service.
“Changing consumer behavior takes time,” Hoffman says. “As we drive more cards available into Paze and more merchant acceptance we’ll see more and more consumers using Paze.”
Part of the plan to get to that point is to use marketing, such as the recent jersey patch sponsorship of the Atlanta Hawks. Hoffman says that will help create awareness in the payments ecosystem, especially as many financial-services companies operate out of Atlanta. Hoffman is no stranger to these kinds of efforts. He helped lead Apple Inc.’s rollout of merchant acceptance for its Apple Pay service.
EWS also is refining Paze as its usage rises, Hoffman says. For now, the focus is on conversion-rate improvement, along with examining potential friction points that might tempt a user to abandon a Paze transaction, he says.
