The biggest banks in America move the money behind almost everything you buy. They haven't figured out how to get you to click a button to pay at checkout.
The digital wallets that allow online shoppers to click to avoid manually typing in their credit card numbers are largely operated by technology giants like Apple Pay and Google Pay and PayPal. On a small but growing number of sites, you might also find some banks' entry into the field, called Paze. You might scroll right past it.
"Nobody knows Paze," says Serge Elkiner, who runs it. "Like, what is Paze?"
Facing stiff competition for market share and looking for relevance, Paze is turning to an unlikely group -- the holdouts and technophobes who have so far shunned digital wallets.
While about 70% of consumers under age 40 use a digital wallet, only 41% of those over 40 do, according to J.D. Power. Paze wants to convince this older group to get on the bandwagon, and it recently ramped up the effort with ads and promotions targeting this demographic.
The alternative to grabbing market share is costly. Banks have to pay Apple a fee of about 0.15% of the purchase price when one of their credit cards is used in Apple Pay. Crone Consulting, a payments-advisory firm, estimates that U.S. card issuers paid Apple at least $750 million in fees across online and in-app purchases in 2025.
Paze is part of Early Warning Services, a company owned by seven of the largest banks including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. The firm's more popular product is Zelle, which sends money between customer accounts. Zelle also got off to a rocky start, only to gain steam as it got embedded into the banking apps that customers already used.
Paze's pitch is that it operates directly through bank and credit-union mobile apps. There is no account to create. Customers activate the wallet and eligible cards that their bank has already loaded into Paze. The bet, Elkiner said, is that someone thinks: "It's from my bank. I'm gonna try it."
Paze's research has found that roughly half of bank customers rarely use a digital wallet. Its market researchers have called the profile of these people "protectionists." They are mostly over 44, skew slightly female and are affluent. Most important, they are loyal to their banks.
That was the subject of one recent advertisement featuring Elizabeth Banks and Gabrielle Union (banks and credit unions -- get it?). Both actresses are in the age range that Paze is chasing.
Paze brought in Elkiner two years ago to turn the product around. He had run product development for Visa's global money-movement business and sold his own payments company, YellowPepper, to Visa in 2020. One early investor in his company described him as "a consummate networker."
To find its target demographic, Paze surveyed customers across participating banks, then ran interviews, usability tests and focus groups, said Maryam Khosrowshahi-Paez, Paze's head of marketing. More than half of the protectionists said they already used Zelle, which sends money between customer accounts. Many adopted Zelle because it came from their bank.
Paze's research found that 72% of the protectionists it interviewed believed manually typing a card number into a website was safer than using a digital wallet.
"That was the stat that shocked me," Khosrowshahi-Paez said. She quizzed friends outside work. They believed it, too.
Banks and cybersecurity experts say typing the number carries more risk because it hands card information to the website, whereas a digital wallet typically doesn't.
It takes work to get people to try something new, which is one reason for the promotional blitz that Paze launched in June.
Lakeitha Elliott, 49, tried Paze last month after she saw a Facebook post touting an offer where customers could spend $10 with Paze and get $10 back, up to 10 times. She looked through the list of merchants and activated two eligible cards.
The Portland, Ore., resident had previously gotten promotional emails for Paze through Capital One and Chase, which she ignored. "It wasn't offering any promotion or deal or anything," she said.
She has since used Paze three times, all of which were at Wendy's, where she usually typed her card number into the app each time she ordered. She plans to keep using Paze.
Still, Paze isn't available at many familiar checkout pages. EBay and Nike, for example, accept Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, but neither company appears in Paze's merchant directory.
"All new payment types start with merchant acceptance," said Richard Crone, chief executive of Crone Consulting.
Eric Hoffman, Early Warning's chief partnerships officer, says Paze is trying to sign up coffee shops and other places where people make everyday purchases.
The checkout button may also matter less if AI starts to do the shopping. Amazon.com has tools that track a price and buy when it drops. Walmart lets customers buy through ChatGPT. PayPal is powering checkout for artificial-intelligence shopping agents.
Less than 1% of consumers said they had used Paze for an online purchase in the previous 90 days, compared with 41% for PayPal and 24% for Apple Pay, according to an April survey by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Paze says its June promotional campaign has beaten its forecasts. Activations nearly doubled in the four weeks after the June 15 launch, compared with the four weeks before. It said it was too early to know how many people keep using the wallet after the credits run out.
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