Early Warning (usually “Early Warning Services” or EWS) is a bank‑owned financial technology company and consumer reporting agency that tracks people’s checking and savings account activity and helps banks detect fraud and assess risk.
What Early Warning Does
Early Warning collects information about your deposit accounts, such as account status, overdrafts, negative balances, unpaid fees, account closures, and suspected fraud or misuse. Banks and credit unions use this data to decide whether to open new accounts for you, keep existing accounts open, and to verify that deposits and payments are legitimate.
Who Owns Early Warning
Early Warning is co‑owned by several of the largest U.S. banks, including Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Truist, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. It also owns and operates Zelle, the peer‑to‑peer payment network used by thousands of banks and credit unions.
How It Affects Consumers
Early Warning works somewhat like a “banking version” of a credit bureau: banks pull an Early Warning report to see your banking history before approving a new checking or savings account. Negative data on that report can lead to denials or closures of bank accounts, even though it does not directly change your credit scores with Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion.
Your Rights And Access
Because Early Warning is a consumer reporting agency, it is covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which gives you the right to request a copy of your report and dispute inaccurate information. You can request your Early Warning consumer report directly from the company, usually once per year at no cost.
How It Can Harm You
Negative entries on an Early Warning report can cause banks and credit unions to:
Deny new checking or savings account applications, even if your credit scores are good.
Close existing accounts or restrict services if they view you as a fraud or account‑management risk.
Treat you as higher risk for other products (like overdraft lines or some cards) because of unpaid fees, repeated overdrafts, or fraud flags.
These denials and closures do not usually show up as “late payments” or “collections” on your regular credit report unless the bank separately sends an unpaid debt to collections, which can then appear with the credit bureaus and directly damage your credit scores.
Indirect Damage To Your Credit
Early Warning can indirectly hurt your credit by making it harder to manage your finances smoothly:
If you cannot open a mainstream bank account, you may rely on prepaid cards, check‑cashing, and high‑fee services, making it easier to miss bill payments or fall behind on debts that do report to credit bureaus.
If a bank closes an account with a negative balance and sends that balance to a collection agency, that collection can be reported to the credit bureaus and lower your credit scores.
In that sense, Early Warning itself is not changing your scores, but it can start a chain of events that leads to negative items on your actual credit reports.
Errors And Legal Problems
Like credit reports, Early Warning reports can contain mistakes or outdated information, such as incorrect fraud flags or amounts owed. In the past, Early Warning has faced legal action for problems with how it handled consumer information and disclosures, which shows that inaccurate or poorly explained entries have led to people being wrongly denied accounts.
What You Can Do
If you think Early Warning has damaged you:
Request a free copy of your Early Warning consumer report and review it for errors or unknown accounts.
Dispute any inaccurate or incomplete information in writing, with copies of supporting documents such as bank letters or statements.
If an error has caused repeated denials or serious financial harm and disputes have not fixed it, consider speaking with a consumer‑rights or credit‑reporting attorney about your options
