Walmart
“Can Walmart leverage its 270M weekly shoppers and marketplace scale to build a vertically integrated financial services ecosystem—through OnePay and seller-facing embedded finance—that reduces reliance on third-party fintech partners and captures a share of consumer and SMB financial services?”
Founded as a discount brick-and-mortar retailer, Walmart has steadily built a parallel embedded finance layer atop its retail infrastructure. The 2019 Affirm partnership introduced BNPL at scale; the 2021 launch of One (now OnePay) with Ribbit Capital signals an ambition to own the full consumer financial relationship—banking, credit, BNPL, and eventually investment—for its 270M weekly shoppers. Simultaneously, Walmart is extending financial infrastructure to its marketplace sellers through working capital products (Walmart Marketplace Capital) and the 2025 JPMorgan embedded finance partnership, positioning itself as a platform and not merely a retailer.