The news: Early Warning System is trying to jump-start adoption of the Paze digital wallet with a cash-back promotion.

Paze users can earn $10 back up to 10 times per card at participating online merchants between June 15 and September 10. 

How we got here: Raising consumer awareness and increasing usability for Paze has been a major goal for EWS since its inception in 2024. 

• It integrated with Worldpay and Fiserv to increase acceptance last June.
• Paze got its buy button visible on Nuvei merchants last September.
• Paze incorporated Citi credit cardholders in March—its largest expansion beyond EWS member banks.
• And the digital wallet launched a campaign featuring Elizabeth Banks and Gabrielle Union to raise brand awareness.

Why this matters: Paze needs strong incentives to shift consumers away from more popular wallets like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. 

Giving users up to $100 in statement credits per card could encourage shoppers to use Paze for smaller, more frequent transactions, like putting in a mobile order at Dunkin—build new payment behaviors through repeated use to max out the reward benefit. 

But Paze still has an acceptance problem. While this incentive could attract users, rewards are limited to a handful of merchants. Until Paze can close that network gap, the convenience that drives repeat use will be stunted.

Implications for fintechs: The popularity of P2P and buy now, pay later (BNPL) apps like Cash App, Klarna, Affirm, PayPal, and Venmo gives these players an advantage at ecommerce checkout over banks that rolled out Paze much later. 

New digital wallets face the burden of rapidly scaling their acceptance networks while also offering a deeper bench of rewards to draw users to their ecosystems. Focusing on promotions that drive users to repeatedly interact with new wallets can help to build new payment habits, but not if that wallet can only be used at a handful of shoppers’ preferred merchants.

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