Despite the fact that Walmart already offers its own mobile payment system, the retailer is opening up doors to other forms of digital payments in an effort to cut costs on processing electronic transactions.
Walmart customers will be able to use Chase Pay starting next year to pay for purchases both on Walmart.com and in the Walmart app, The Wall Street Journal reports, while shoppers can also use Walmart Pay in physical stores.
Walmart is trying to reduce the fees it has to pay for taking debit and credit card payments, and conveniently enough, Chase has said that merchants who use its payment services could pay lower fees for card transactions than they would otherwise. In September, Walmart also said it would use Chase’s back-end system called ChaseNet to process card transactions at lower rates.
“We believe the agreements we have announced will bring much needed competition to the payments markets,” a Walmart spokesman said.
This isn’t Walmart’s first time at the mobile payments rodeo: along with its proprietary Walmart Pay system, the retailer is a member of the Merchant Customer Exchange, known as MCX, which is a group of companies that got together in 2012 and planned on building a mobile payment technology called CurrentC that would compete with others in the field.
But because it’s not terribly easy to create an entirely new payment system, those efforts have apparently been put on hold for the time being.
“MCX is focused on our core business working with our merchants and financial institutions,” the group, which also has an agreement to use Chase Pay, told the WSJ in a statement.
“We see value in both MCX and Chase Pay,” Walmar’t spokesman added to the WSJ.
Wal-Mart to Offer Chase Pay Service [The Wall Street Journal]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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