Many of Walmart’s core customers live rurally on modest incomes and probably aren’t the sort in search of glamourous tech.
Each week, the big retailer serves approximately 220 million customers globally and employs over 2.3 million associates. For this reason, Walmart has hired Omer Ismail, the Head of Consumer Business at Goldman Sachs, and David Stark, the Head of Apple Card, also at Goldman.Īs the FT’s Robert Armstrong puts it, Walmart’s biggest competitive advantage in financial services is its huge customer base. Thus, in early 2021, news broke that the big US retailer was keen to set-up a fintech partnership with venture firm Ribbit Capital. Since those early attempts, the landscape has changed dramatically: the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the advent of the iPhone and the subsequent rise of smartphones, the definitive affirmation of Western tech mammoths like the GAFAs and the Coronavirus pandemic. Despite external challenges and competitive threats, but thanks to a changing regulatory landscape, Walmart has recently taken a different journey to enter banking – and it could be big news for retail (and the FS sector). After its second effort was rebuffed in 2007, they temporarily gave up.
At the time, Walmart made two separate efforts to enter banking in the United States but was repelled. The love story between Walmart and finance began more than twenty years ago, when Walton’s retail giant started to flirt with banking in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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