Early Warning, the company that manages the person-to-person payment service Zelle, has a new CEO, Albert Ko. He succeeds Paul W. Finch Jr., who retired in March.
Ko comes to Early Warning from Intuit, where he was the chief transformation officer. During his tenure there, he was general manager of Mint and at another point oversaw QuickBooks.
Ko says he will spend his first month on the new job listening and learning about how Zelle — which is owned by seven banks — operates. In the first quarter of 2019, $39 billion was sent through the Zelle network in 147 million transactions.
"I have the great fortune of inheriting a business that’s growing and that is doing well,” Ko said. "The reason I was hired is to be a change agent, to refresh the strategy and to lead it into its next phase of growth. Job No. 1 is to learn and listen to our own employees and to the key stakeholders in the market."
Part of Ko’s mandate will be to help manage the next phase of Early Warning’s evolution from a business-to-business company to a business-to-consumer company.
“We’re scaling an organization from the size it is today to many multiples,” Ko said.
One thing he’ll be working on is Zelle’s user interface.
“Zelle is beloved by users, but it's still a new muscle for Early Warning," Ko said. "That's one of the areas where I might contribute a great deal. I use [Zelle] all the time — there’s still a lot of room to take friction out of the system, make it even more delightful. And as we contemplate broader use cases there's a lot of usability that can be enhanced, both through our own efforts and working with all the banks.”
One of bankers' persistent worries about Zelle is the potential for fraud. Ko says he will be on top of that.
“We take fraud as seriously as anyone,” he said. “Fraud is expected in any payment service, especially with a new one that gets a lot of attention. We've made strides working with financial institutions to stamp out fraud, where the fraud numbers we’re seeing are well inside of the expectations. And because it's the banks' reputations on the line, they hold our feet to the fire on those.”
Early Warning has been trying to improve the way it shares information with banks when fraud is detected.
"We had an opportunity to make that more real-time and across all the institutions, not just some of them, and we've been able to do so," Ko said. "That's just an example of how we can stamp out fraud before it happens, or in some cases, happens again."
Early Warning also works to warn consumers to make sure they only send money to people they know.
