Wallmart Preempting postal banking

Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, a status it earned by putting every product a shopper could conceivably need under one roof. For years, though, one major area of consumer activity had proven elusive for the Bentonville giant: financial services. That’s set to change in late October, when Walmart will begin offering basic transactional accounts under the brand name GoBank, through a partnership with Green Dot Bank.

To some, Walmart’s focus on the financial needs of low-income customers could prove an effective strategy to reduce the number of “unbanked” or “underbanked” Americans. Those are the nearly 10 million U.S. households that rely largely on “alternative financial services” — predatory institutions like check cashers and payday lenders that charge exorbitant rates for their services.

Yet others are skeptical of Walmart’s intentions, instead seeing a clear attempt by one of the world’s largest corporations to profit further from its poorest customers’ lack of banking options.

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