Payfinia, an independent payment services firm focused on an open payments framework, has partnered with Early Warning Services to enable financial institutions to offer Paze, an online checkout solution. Star One Credit Union, a large credit union based in California with over $9 billion in assets, is the initial financial institution onboarding Paze through Payfinia.
Paze is designed as a secure, efficient online checkout solution utilizing tokenization to protect sensitive card information, ensuring actual card numbers are not shared with merchants. Through this collaboration, participating financial institutions will leverage Payfinia’s digital wallet services, which are engineered to streamline the secure exchange of eligibility information and facilitate access to the Paze digital wallet checkout experience. Payfinia’s service incorporates a confidential computing layer to safeguard critical user data provided by financial institutions, ensuring user privacy and compliance.
Minal Gupta, President at Star One Credit Union, stated, “We’re proud to be launching Paze for Star One Credit Union customers later this year, bringing a seamless digital wallet experience to our 132,000 members.” Nizar Jamal, CTO of Payfinia, commented on the technical integration: “The confidential computing overlay service enables Payfinia to process and analyze financial data in a safe environment, ensuring both speed and security for the financial institution and their digital wallet users.”
Eric Hoffman, Chief Partnerships Officer at Early Warning Services, noted, “Through our partnership with Payfinia, credit unions and community financial institutions will now have a more streamlined path to offering Paze. Payfinia’s trusted relationships and technical capabilities make them an ideal partner to help extend the reach of Paze—bringing a fast, easy and convenient online checkout experience to more consumers through the institutions they know and already use.”
According to the Paze Pulse SM report, 82% of respondents indicate higher trust in their bank’s security compared to third-party payment options for digital wallets. Keith Riddle, General Manager of Payfinia, emphasized consumer demand: “More consumers are demanding a seamless eCommerce checkout experience, and they prefer to initiate the checkout process through a digital banking solution offered by their financial institution. We are thrilled to partner with Early Warning Services to offer Paze to our open payments framework and eCommerce services as a means for community financial institutions to enhance the digital wallet experience revenue. Through this partnership, our clients will have a seamless, eCommerce service, creating more efficient checkout experiences and satisfied consumers.”
Paze, operated by Early Warning Services, LLC, is an online checkout solution for banks and credit unions that aggregates eligible debit and credit cards into a single digital wallet, aiming to simplify the e-commerce checkout process by eliminating manual card entry. More than 150 million credit and debit cards have been integrated into the Paze checkout solution.
Payfinia Inc. provides community financial institutions (CFIs) with access to and ownership of instant payment services, including its flagship Instant Payments Xchange (IPX). The company also collaborates with third-party digital providers to integrate instant payments with traditional solutions, thereby expanding technology provider capabilities and enhancing the payments ecosystem for CFIs.
