Dive Brief:

• Early Warning Services has launched its Paze digital wallet in Texas, and is rolling it out across six New England states, EWS Managing Director James Anderson said in an interview.
• Paze is now available to all eligible customers in Arizona, South Carolina and Texas after previously being available only to EWS employees and their friends and family earlier this year, Anderson confirmed.
• “About 80,000” merchants are signed up to accept payments via the digital wallet, according to Anderson, though he acknowledged many of them are small businesses. “I like to say it's the dog walker in Seattle,” he said. 

Dive Insight:

Paze’s New England rollout includes all six of the region’s states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, a spokesperson for Scottsdale, Arizona-based EWS said in an email. The rollout is “the first big wave” of bringing multiple U.S. states online, Anderson said.

The process of launching in a state requires Paze to pre-load cards from customers in participating banks, which will require EWS, which is owned by seven big banks, to load about 150 million cards for a nationwide rollout, according to Anderson. 

“When we create a wallet, the consumer gets notified by the financial institution that their card has been added, and then they're able to use it anywhere Paze is accepted,” Anderson said. “We also make it very easy for them to unenroll if they're not interested.” 

Paze plans to launch in all 50 U.S. states by summer, Anderson said. The rollout also includes a marketing push to familiarize consumers with the Paze brand. That marketing will start “in the next month or so,” he said, with the goal of having Paze ready to go for the year-end holiday shopping season.  

Larger merchants, including Texas-based fast food chain Whataburger, now accept Paze at checkout, according to Paze’s website. Anderson pointed to the chain, as well as floral wire service company Teleflora as a “first wave of tier one merchants” that EWS is seeking to attract as Paze payment providers through special marketing campaigns.

Consumers and merchants will not have to pay to use Paze, meaning that banks may have to pay to provide the service. Currently, there is no charge for financial institutions to offer Paze, Anderson said.

“The concept we've talked about is a model of cost recovery where the cost gets split between the participants, but we don't have a formula yet,” Anderson said. “We probably won't make a decision on that, I wouldn't imagine, til sometime next year.”