They’re also trying to push Walmart Pay as well. At their scale, it’s worth it.

Despite the pain, I still think Walmart should’ve acquired and rebranded a bank, and offered financial products. Would do wonders for the unbanked, while keeping their transaction fees down.

I seem to recall from a previous discussion about the possibility of Amazon buying a bank that such an arrangement would be extremely illegal.

IIRC, there's a law expressly prohibiting any company from both acting as a bank and a retail business.

edit: Yep, there is. The Bank Holding Company Act prevents companies in commerce from engaging in banking activities.

Laws can be changed. An entity like Amazon can lobby for a change. Donate money to politicians likely to vote for a change. Call for a change on the editorial page of the Washington Post. Remember, once upon a time, there was but one phone company. Then the law changed... Interstate/branch banking was illegal. Then the law changed. Amazon could probably set up a members-(i.e., customers) only credit union without too much difficulty.

>Despite the pain, I still think Walmart should’ve acquired and rebranded a bank, and offered financial products.

I just wanted to point out that this was actually significantly more difficult than the parent comment may have realized.

That was deregulated by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999 and likely led to the subprime mortgage crisis. It permitted the creation of the "too big to fail" superbanks.

How did Sears do it with Discover, or is this a recent thing?

I was able to find the law I was thinking of, and it was passed in 1956, so not terribly recent, no.

Apparently it's because the BHCA defines banks as entities marketing both checking accounts and commercial loans, and Discover Bank makes no commercial loans and is thus not, under the terms of that law, technically an actual bank.

(Also, apparently the BHCA restricts banks from operating across state lines, too.)

So Walmart could offer checking accounts as long as they don’t lend.

Yep. I thought the law was more restrictive than it was.

They tried. IIRC they were going to buy Green Dot outright, but they were rebuffed by regulators.

So instead they took a small ownership position <5%, in order to avoid the reporting and regulatory hassles while still getting sweetheart deals.

> They’re also trying to push Walmart Pay as well.

I wonder whatever happened to that digital pay system pushed by WalMart that was supposed to be on the level of ApplePay? There was a lot of chatter about it around the time of the release of ApplePay, but I haven't seen much about it since. It was some weird transaction process, open the app, present QR code, do something else on app, re-present QR code or something along those lines.

It was probably based on their membership in the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Customer_Exchange

> Despite the pain, I still think Walmart should’ve acquired and rebranded a bank, and offered financial products.

They do, outside the US. They operate Walmart Canada Bank (and issue Walmart Mastercards), although they've recently sold it.

Tesco and Sainsbury's both have banks in the UK.