Walmart Teams With Fiserv on Instant Bank Payments

Walmart is reportedly enhancing its pay-by-bank offering via a partnership with Fiserv.

The retailer began offering pay-by-bank with Walmart Pay earlier this year, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Sept. 19). But those transactions, processed through the Automated Clearing House, typically took three days to finalize.

Under the new system, customers who make pay-by-bank transactions will see the purchase show up in their bank account balance right away, with Walmart receiving the funds instantly, the report said.

Jamie Henry, vice president of emerging payments at Walmart, said this system can benefit customers with low balances, allowing them to avoid overdrafts or non-sufficient funds fees from their banks, according to the report.

“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, per the report. “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.”

As consumers become frustrated with card fees and banks tap into real-time payment systems, methods like pay-by-bank have enjoyed more traction, the report said.

The new version will launch next year, with transactions happening over Fiserv’s NOW network, which is tied into The Clearing House’s RTP® network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow® Service, per the report.

Large retailers have been reluctant to offer real-time payment options, as many banks were not connected to instant settlement systems, the report said.

However, the PYMNTS Intelligence report “How Real-Time Payments Drive the In-Store Customer Journey” found that while real-time payment adoption by U.S. merchants has been low, its popularity is growing among retailers.

“As an industry we believe we need to create this connectivity,” said Matt Wilcox, head of digital payments at Fiserv, per the Bloomberg report. “FedNow and RTP, they don’t necessarily talk to one another. The NOW Network can play that role in the industry of bringing all these networks together to enable applications like pay-by-bank.”