Emily Mason | (TNS) Bloomberg News
Walmart Inc. customers will soon have the option to pay directly from their bank accounts with instant transfers for online purchases. The enhanced feature is a flash point in the escalating tensions between merchants and the card networks setting the fees for payment processing.
The world’s largest retailer has offered pay-by-bank through Walmart Pay since earlier this year. Until now, the transactions were akin to digital checks and took roughly three days to finalize when being processed through The Automated Clearing House, the same network often used for bill payments or paycheck deposits. Soon, customers opting for pay-by-bank transactions will see the purchase reflected in their bank account balance instantly — and Walmart will receive the funds immediately.
The consumer advantage of instant pay-by-bank over debit cards is avoiding stacked pending transactions. For customers carrying low balances, pending transactions can open them up to the risk of overdraft or non-sufficient funds fees from their bank, according to Jamie Henry, vice president of emerging payments at Walmart.
“When the transaction processes as a real time payment, customers get immediate access to see that payment come through, I see it hit my account and I can properly budget,” Henry said. “It’s not as if I’ve got this phantom payment out there that’s going to take place a couple days down the road.”
In the U.S., most consumers carry credit or debit cards which offer convenience, fraud protections and, in the case of credit products, rewards programs. However, frustration has mounted among merchants over fees they pay for card processing to banks and networks like Visa and Mastercard. At the same time, consumers are bristling as some merchants choose to pass these fees on to them in the form of surcharges. As frustration with card fees grows and more banks connect to real time systems, alternative payment methods like pay-by-bank have an opportunity to gain traction.
“It surprised me,” Henry said of adoption of Walmart’s first iteration of pay-by-bank, which is available online but hasn’t been marketed to customers. “It’s certainly surpassed our expectations of the amount of customers that have registered and actually use the payment type.”
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Walmart’s upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv’s NOW Network, which integrates with The …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
