Walmart Financial Services

Walmart Stores Inc opened new vistas for several of its customers by offering financial services to its wide client base. It decided to offer visa debit cards to the consumers so that the individuals belonging to low income and those who do not have a bank account at handle their money with considerable ease.
This is a step, which has been taken by the other retailers also. The main essence is to deal with the consumers who want to avail of the convenience of plastic money. Of late, Walmart also wanted to diversify into the banking sector. However, it withdrew the application for the banking license.

This is because; the company had encountered much opposition from the critics, unions and other banks. As per reports published by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, as many as 40 million households in United States of America, do not "bank" or are "unbanked".

This implies that these people do not have bank accounts and end up paying more as fees for the various financial services they avail. In addition to the debit cards, there are certain other financial products, which are offered by Walmart Financial Services.
They include :

• Payroll check cashing
• Money orders
• Money Transfers
• Bill payment
• Wal mart branded credit cards

Walmart Financial Services declared that the company would open as many as 1000 plus financial services counters/centers in the stores. This expansion activity would enable as many as 73 million people to access plastic money. With this the company hopes that Walmart 's financial service would grow significantly by 40%.

There are several financial service providers with whom Walmart Financial Services has tied up for providing financial services to the people. They are:

• MoneyGram International
• GE Money Bank
• ShareBuilder Corp

The above may be regarded as investment vehicles for the various money market programs as well as stock market programs.

In addition to the above, Walmart Financial Services offers financial education on the world wide web for the various investors and different categories of market players. Credit reports are offered to the individuals through TransUnion. These are also regarded as few of the financial services offered by Walmart.