As Amazon grows the Bank of Amazon, Walmart is becoming the PayPal of retailers.
Walmart is expanding the reach of its U.S. money-transfer service Walmart2Walmart to recipients in 200 countries for a flat fee. The service, called Walmart2World, will be offered at all of the retailer’s 4,700 U.S. locations starting this month through a partnership with MoneyGram.
Like any retailer, Walmart isn’t exactly taking on the banking industry — although it has its history of that — but instead, it’s making financial services more accessible to its existing customers in order to keep them and maybe increase their shopping activity.
Like PayPal before it, Walmart already emphasizes the physical channel for underbanked customers who can top up their account balances using cash or card at the point of sale. While it has more recently courted higher-income customers, it’s now reaching out to its original customer segment by encouraging consumers to make in-store transactions.
“[Money transfer services] are like bread at the restaurant for Walmart; it’s negligible revenue for them,” said Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer at GBH Insights. “The broader strategy is to build up that product arsenal on the consumer side — every Walmart customer globally is an Amazon customer that could be taken away.”
Read the full story on tearsheet.co
More in Marketing
Marketers are keeping a close eye on Amazon’s shoppable Prime ads this Thanksgiving
Media buyers will be experimenting with new formats over the long weekend.
‘You don’t want to be discounting so much’: Confessions of a media buyer on the challenges of an extended Black Friday Cyber Monday
In the latest edition of our Digiday Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candor, we hear from a media buyer on how the extended sales window means brands need to get more creative and the challenges of deeper discounting.
Google uses search remedies trial to subpoena OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft over their generative AI efforts
In an attempt to show AI has created a more competitive search industry, Google is trying to get OpenAI, Perplexity AI, and Microsoft’s strategies to defend its own.