Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Kevin Woodward
@DTPaymentNews
Add Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to the list of merchants that will accept Chase Pay transactions. JPMorgan Chase & Co., backer of the nascent Chase Pay mobile wallet, says the massive retailer will begin accepting the bank’s payment service in more than 5,000 Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, within the Walmart app, and on Walmart.com beginning in 2017.
The announcement Thursday follows a September deal the retailer made to use ChaseNet, Chase’s closed-loop processing network. Walmart will begin using ChaseNet in 2017, too, Chase says.
“We are excited about the opportunity to provide our customers with even greater convenience and value to our Walmart Pay app while expanding our relationship with Chase,” Mike Cook, senior vice president and assistant treasurer for Walmart, said in a press release. “Adding Chase Pay as an option within Walmart Pay and online will create an enhanced experience for our customers.”
Chase Pay will appear as a button, akin to Visa Checkout and Masterpass, on Walmart.com, a Walmart spokesman says. Within the Walmart app, Chase Pay will be listed as a payment option. To use Chase Pay in the store, consumers will have to use the Walmart app, the spokesman says.
Chase says the integration of Chase Pay into the Walmart app wil be done to ensure it is seamless and intuitive, a Chase spokesman says. “We will work closely with all our partners to help integrate Chase Pay into their payment systems,” he says.
Announced in 2015, Chase Pay is a digital wallet that consumers can use to make purchases using Chase-issued Visa credit and debit cards. Chase Pay will levy a single, fixed fee to merchants and eschew card-network interchange and processing fees.
Walmart’s inclusion of Chase Pay gives it a way to lower its card-processing costs, Michael Moeser, director of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, tells Digital Transactions News via email. “For Chase, it provides significant volume to be run through its network, ChaseNet, which it leases from Visa,” Moeser adds.
Walmart is the latest merchant to announce it will accept Chase Pay, which already is accepted on some e-commerce sites. Earlier this year, Chase announced Starbucks Corp., and its 7,500 company-operated stores, will accept Chase Pay. Phillips 66, Shell Oil Co., and electronics retailer Best Buy Co. have also signed on to accept the wallet.
Aside from Walmart, Chase says Chase Pay will launch yet this year as a mobile-payment service at participating merchant locations and as an in-app payment option.
The potential user base for Chase Pay is huge. Chase says it has more than 94 million consumer credit, debit, and prepaid card accounts, which will be pre-loaded into Chase Pay wallets, and almost 26 million consumers use the Chase mobile-banking app.
Walmart, like Best Buy, had been part of Merchant Customer Exchange, a retailer consortium that had been developing a mobile wallet but shuttered its pilot this summer. Like MCX’s CurrentC wallet, for example, Chase Pay links to the point of sale through barcode scanning, a method also used by Walmart Pay.
“MCX had a goal of building direct relationships with banks and circumventing the networks,” says Rick Oglesby, principal at AZPayments Group LLC, a Mesa, Ariz-based consultancy. “The agreement with Chase is exactly the type of agreements MCX was seeking, so we can expect the MCX merchants to continue to work with Chase even after MCX announced its change in strategy and reduction in staff.”
