How Paze is betting bank trust can crack the digital wallet market
- The digital wallet space is crowded, but Paze is betting that consumer trust in banks — not tech giants — is the unlock.
- In this episode, Serge Elkiner, General Manager of Paze at Early Warning Services, breaks down how the bank-backed wallet is building toward critical mass through merchant expansion, issuer growth, and a deliberate focus on the consumers other wallets haven't won yet.
Early Warning built Zelle into the dominant peer-to-peer payments network in the U.S., processing over a trillion dollars in yearly transactions. Paze is their next bet: a bank-backed digital wallet for e-commerce checkout, backed by the same seven major banks, designed to bring that same institutional trust to online shopping.
Serge Elkiner came on as GM in late 2024, brought over from Visa, where he ran product for money movement globally. His mandate is to unlock what that network can do at checkout — with 165 million eligible cards now in place and distribution deals closing with Fiserv, Worldpay, and ACI.
Today, we talk about what it takes to convert infrastructure into consumer behavior and whether the banks can do for e-commerce what they did for P2P.
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Serge Elkiner and Paze
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