What Is Early Warning Services?
Early Warning Services (EWS) is a specialty nationwide consumer reporting agency that focuses on deposit accounts, if you’re familiar with ChexSystems then Early Warning Services provides a similar service to ChexSystems. EWS was created by a number of large financial institutions (e.g Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Capital One & Wells Fargo) more than 25 years ago. There are now over 2,300 financial institutions that use EWS.
These financial institutions primarily use EWS to help them determine if they should approve or deny somebody for a new deposit account (similar to how credit card issuers use consumer reporting agencies Equifax, Experian & TransUnion). EWS reports are useful for this as they will contain negative information regarding an individual, such as instances of:
- Fraud
- Forgery
- Check Kiting
- And more
Another one of the uses of EWS is to authenticate you are who you say you are, this is usually done by asking a series of financial/general questions that only you’d know the answer to (e.g previous address, specific loan amounts etc).
Request Your Report
To request your free report from EWS, you need to call them on (800) 325-7775 Monday – Friday 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. Can also be requested online now.
Final Thoughts
We’ve also started compiling a list of financial institutions that do and don’t use EWS, you can view that list here. We have similar information already on the site for ChexSystems:
