Walmart is the latest retailer to accept Chase Pay — which has also made deals with other companies, such as Starbucks — and should be rolling out to customers sometime next year.
The Chase Pay service will be made available to customers both on Walmart’s website and its Walmart Pay app, which the retail giant announced earlier this year.
Walmart has been stepping up its efforts to bring the full force of its huge physical retail presence into the digital world this year, acquiring e-commerce site Jet.com, announcing the launch of Walmart Pay, and the company stopped accepting Visa cards at some of its locations (though that last move is due more to its little kerfuffle with Visa over fees, rather than a calculated decision to make its customers pay by phone).
As has been noted, mobile payments — especially at the point of sale — have not been widely adopted by consumers, but it is an area that continues to be explored by the payments industry or even by tech companies like IBM.
“Mobile and contactless are already in the market and growing,” says Soumya Dev Chakrabarty, director of research and development for Discover, on trends within the industry. “[Payments] is definitely shifting to being more seamless and frictionless.”
The Walmart and Chase partnership was announced today by Chase Executive Kevin Watters at the BancAnalysts Association of Boston Conference.
Said Watters at the conference:
What we really focus on — and this true when we look at Chase Pay — is where are people spending their money? We want to make sure we are top of wallet [there].
It is interesting to note that while the partnership is for digital services, the two players involved are companies more on the traditional than the disruptive side of finance — while innovative, Chase is an incumbent bank, and Walmart reigns supreme as the brick-and-mortar retailer.
It will remain to be seen if this integration will actually make PoS mobile payments any more valuable to consumers.