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
Why the ad industry is redefining what it means to be a creator vs. influencer
As the industry evolves, there are now more ways to differentiate between the types of content coming from creators and influencers.
What a second Trump presidential term means for media and advertising
Donald Trump is poised to take the reins of the U.S. presidency for a second term, and this time, the impact on the media and advertising industries is set to be significantly more profound.
The number of ad tech mergers and acquisitions is developing from a trickle to a steady flow
Some companies in the space are even talking about public listings.