Early Warning Services

Early Warning Services operates the identity and deposit-account risk infrastructure that underpins most of the U.S. retail banking system, and it owns and runs Zelle, the real-time person-to-person payments network. Founded in 1990 and jointly owned by seven of the largest U.S. banks (Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Truist, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo), the company sits in an unusual position: it is simultaneously critical payments infrastructure and a fraud-and-identity data utility that banks rely on to decide whether to open, maintain, or close an account.

Its core business is aggregating deposit-account history, closure reasons, and fraud signals across thousands of participating financial institutions, then scoring the risk that a given identity or account is fraudulent or synthetic. In 2025 the company consolidated its identity-verification and payment-risk products under a new brand, Certos, reflecting a strategic push further upstream into identity proofing rather than just after-the-fact fraud reporting. Because participation is effectively mandatory for large U.S. retail banks, Early Warning has data breadth that few identity vendors can match.

The obvious tension is that Early Warning is owned by the same banks whose fraud and reputational exposure it is meant to police, and its flagship product, Zelle, has drawn sustained regulatory and press scrutiny (including a 2024 CFPB lawsuit against the operator and several owner banks) over inadequate consumer fraud protections. For CISOs and fraud leaders at financial institutions, Early Warning is less a vendor to evaluate on a bake-off and more an incumbent utility that is already embedded in how the account has to work.