Finding a Door Into Banking, Walmart to Offer Checking Accounts

[steve2470]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/business/finding-a-door-into-banking-walmart-to-offer-checking-accounts.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

Here comes Wal-Bank again.

After years of thwarted efforts to break into banking, Walmart is making another run at everyday financial services.

Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, is teaming up with Green Dot, known for its prepaid payment cards, to supply checking accounts to almost anyone over 18 who passes an identification check.

Daniel Eckert, senior vice president at Walmart, said on Tuesday that the accounts would be available nationwide by the end of October. The accounts are intended to be low-cost alternatives to traditional bank checking accounts, with no fees for overdrafts or bounced checks and no minimum account balance.

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Mea culpa: I was wrong about Wal-Mart offering space to lawyers, so, I have no objection to this either.

[louis-t]

1. No fees yet.

"No fees for overdrafts or bounced checks"? This will not end well for Wally World.

[steve2470]

2. good point nt

[politicat]

3. Huh. That may be what breaks them.

There's an anarchist theory of economic monkey wrenching that pretty much defaults to do as much damage as quickly as possible, then retreat. So get as many big corporate credit cards as possible, max them out (at corporate stores, not small businesses because small business is a form of anarchy), redistribute/move on, never pay up. (I'm not saying I approve or advise, but I'm not an anarchist. Just an amiable Democratic Socialist with odd friends. I also don't know anyone who had ever done it, or at least, anyone who admitted to it. It's also how most ID fraud works.)

That no bounce, no overdraft, no minimum is a point of failure. Hit the system fast and hard and it probably quakes. I don't know what WM's internal books look like, but if they're like pretty much every other corporation, most of their wealth is close to imaginary. Corps have come down with relatively minor wounds to strategic targets before -- Enron, Arthur Anderson, Washington Mutual...

The thing is, it could happen without any intentional organization, just the economics of being poor and having a lot of poor people who are all unbanked, who all have cash flow problems, who use a single vendor for most of their consumption -- and that describes WM. I'd bet February looks bad, since February is the hardest month if you're poor -- 24 fewer working hours (assuming an 8 hour work day), cold, so higher electric/gas/oil bills, and the rent stays the same.

They're already in a less than excellent situation, given that sales are flat or declining, and they've annoyed almost everyone.