Early Warning Services Revives Certos Brand for Risk Defense
Early this month, Early Warning Services rolled out the Certos name, which might have looked like a brand-new division, but it was not an addition.
Instead, the firm returned to its origins in fraud prevention, renaming the legacy operation that launched it in 1990, when the “early warning” label signified tools to curb bank risk and fraud.
With industry participants racing toward modern payment experiences and real-time settlement amid rising scams, Early Warning Services moved to reassert its role supplying fraud prevention and payment risk solutions.
Certos’ fraud prevention services center on helping banks, credit unions, and other payment participants assess risk at two of the most common choke points: when an account is opened and when money moves. Under the Certos umbrella, the company positions its offering as a set of screening, identity and account validation, and transaction-risk tools that flag suspicious activity, generate risk indicators, and support operational review before funds are sent or accounts are approved.
Certos also leans on data and analytics drawn from payment activity and account-opening signals to spot patterns that do not look “normal” for a customer, device, or counterparty. In practice, that can mean analytic models that score risk, identify anomalies, and produce alerts that fraud teams can investigate or route into existing bank workflows.
Brings Together Decades of Screening Payments
In an April 16 rebranding note, the company said the Certos umbrella unifies long-standing capabilities. The unit screened about $11 trillion in payment activity last year and evaluated roughly 100 million new account openings at banks and credit unions.
Certos consolidates decades of trusted fraud prevention into a single brand.
Ben Chance, tapped last year to run the group that became Certos, said at the Nacha Smarter Faster Payments Conference in San Diego that fraud remains as common today as a decade ago, observing that many expo booths focused on fighting it.
As an industry, we must reinvest in tools and analytics for fraud prevention and keep pace with threat actors’ innovation.
For financial institutions, the fraud-reduction mechanism is typically a combination of earlier detection and tighter decisioning. By screening new-account applications and monitoring payment flows, a bank can stop suspicious enrollments, apply step-up verification when risk is elevated, and route questionable transactions for review, which can reduce losses while also limiting unnecessary declines that frustrate customers.
Real-Time Rails and Payments Modernization
Although the Scottsdale, Arizona, company is widely associated with Zelle and its digital wallet Paze, Certos is the largest unit by headcount, accounting for nearly half of about 1,600 employees. Early Warning Services serves roughly 2,500 financial institutions, including the 20 largest banks in the United States, Chance said.
Momentum for modernization accelerated last year with an executive order from President Donald Trump directing a broader shift to digital disbursements by the federal government and pressuring companies that still rely on paper checks to follow.
Since the Federal Reserve introduced the instant payments service FedNow in 2023, joining the privately run Real-Time Payments network, the push to accelerate transactions has intensified; those rails enable movement in seconds rather than days.
Everything is moving to real time and faster payments, so we needed real-time capabilities to support rapid processing and account opening.
Real-time fraud detection in that environment depends on doing risk checks at the same speed as settlement. That generally means low-latency analytics that evaluate a transaction as it is initiated, assign a risk level, and support immediate actions such as allowing the payment, declining it, or pausing it for additional verification so that suspicious transfers are caught before they finalize.
Leadership and Business Units
Following Cameron Fowler’s appointment as chief executive officer in 2023, the company reorganized in 2024 into three businesses, naming general managers for each: Chance for Certos, Denise Leonhard for Zelle, and Serge Elkiner for Paze, all reporting to Fowler.
Scams, Scrutiny, and Legal Fights
Chance and his team have also confronted reputational challenges. The company has faced congressional criticism and lawsuits tied to scams and fraud on Zelle, though management maintains such incidents represent a tiny share of overall payments.
Even so, last year New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a case alleging the company permitted fraud on the Zelle network for years, costing consumers more than $1 billion.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a similar action in December 2024 during the Biden administration, claiming fraud had been allowed to “fester” within Zelle, but that case was dropped last year under the Trump administration.
Seven common types of fraud that fraud-prevention programs often aim to address include identity theft (using stolen personal data), account takeover (hijacking an existing account), new-account fraud (opening accounts with false or stolen identities), authorized push payment scams (tricking a customer into sending money), card-not-present payment fraud (misuse of card credentials online), check fraud (altered, counterfeit, or misdirected checks), and business email compromise (impersonation used to redirect payments). Certos’ positioning around account opening and payment screening aligns most directly with identity- and account-related fraud as well as payment fraud and scam-driven transfers, especially where rapid movement raises the stakes.
Fraud teams often describe the “three C’s” of fraud as capability, confidence, and concealment: the ability to execute the scheme, the belief it will work, and the means to hide it long enough to get paid. Programs built around analytics, verification, and monitoring are designed to erode those advantages by making attempts harder to complete, easier to detect, and more difficult to mask.
For consumers looking to report suspected fraud, the immediate step is typically to call the financial institution using the phone number on the back of the debit or credit card or on the account statement so the institution can freeze access, review transfers, and start recovery steps. If identity theft is involved, consumers can also contact the Federal Trade Commission’s identity theft hotline at 1-877-438-4338; emergencies should be reported to local law enforcement.
Obligation to Help Prevent Fraud
Chance framed the renewed focus on the anti-fraud arena as a core responsibility for the company.
We saw not only an opportunity but an obligation to retool, rethink our approach to fraud, and act in service of reducing it.
That benefits consumers, small businesses, and financial institutions—and ultimately the American economy—by strengthening trust in the payments ecosystem.
As for the “best” fraud protection program, industry practice generally points to a layered approach rather than a single silver bullet: strong identity and account-opening controls, real-time transaction monitoring, adaptive verification when risk rises, and clear dispute and case-handling processes. Certos is positioned as one option within that broader toolkit, intended to complement a bank’s internal controls and other vendor systems by adding screening and analytics across account-opening and payment activity, with tuning based on the institution’s products, customer base, and risk tolerance.
Certos’ solutions are typically adapted by use case rather than a one-size-fits-all package, with different controls for consumer and small-business accounts, different thresholds for higher-risk payment types, and workflows that fit how institutions staff fraud operations. That flexibility matters because the same underlying services may be applied differently for a large bank with specialized fraud teams, a credit union with a leaner operation, or a digital-first institution focused on fast onboarding.