Walmart tap to pay is live, on 21 August, Walmart announced that contactless payments would reach select stores and Sam’s Club locations from 24 August, all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026, and fuel stations by mid-2027. Eligible Walmart, Sam’s Club and OnePay cards can now sit in customers’ digital wallets. A concession to consumer pressure, or a win Walmart engineered?
Our expert’s take: Andrew Steadman, Chief Product Officer at SBS
Walmart tap to pay is here. Does accepting it give Walmart leverage over the card networks, or hand it back to Visa and Mastercard?
On the face of it, it looks like Walmart has given in to consumer pressure. That may be part of the story, but there’s much more at play in its acceptance of NFC payments.
Not only has Walmart negotiated better interchange fees for credit transactions, it can also route debit over alternative networks to manage costs, a result of the Durbin Amendment. But most importantly, Walmart’s financial products are now in the Apple Wallet through OnePay. This is a significant gain: Walmart’s products can become the default payment method for NFC transactions made outside its own stores. That is huge and should not be underestimated.
For many years, Walmart has offered in-store bill payment as part of its financial services as well as its own wallet for paying in stores. Now it is stepping outside its own retail space. So if I use a Walmart debit card in my Apple Wallet at, say, an Apple Store, Visa and Mastercard may not be involved at all if the transaction is routed over a different debit network. That is significant.
Walmart tap to pay hides the purchase data that its QR system used to capture. Is it giving up its most valuable asset?
The tap is only one element of the transaction data available at the till. If I’ve scanned my Sam’s Club card or Walmart+ membership, Walmart already knows exactly what I’ve bought and how often I buy it. The payment transaction data is the only piece it might not capture, and in reality, that isn’t worth much from in-store purchases.
Walmart isn’t like a traditional card provider, which isn’t the retailer and can’t see the contents of my basket. Walmart sees both. So it isn’t giving up much data; it already has the detail of what I purchased. The card transaction doesn’t record the 30 individual items I bought, it just sees a single transaction. This is really about the cost of transactions through interchange fees, and about Walmart getting into the NFC wallets.
As contactless becomes the default, who gains the power: the networks, the wallets, or the AI agents that will soon check out for us?
Power goes to those who can use the data well, and companies like Walmart in the USA or Tesco in the UK are examples of businesses that do this really well. So I think it’s less about gaining power and more about giving consumers flexibility and ease of use while protecting margins.
In the USA, as in Europe, real-time debit is moving into the consumer space, as we’ve seen with Walmart and with Wero in Europe. This is the real threat to traditional networks like Visa and Mastercard. But we shouldn’t forget that when I buy something on a credit card, the purchase is often insured. That matters less for groceries, but for something like a holiday, it’s a key part of a credit card’s value.
What Walmart tap to pay really buys: our expert’s wrap-up
As consumers come to better understand their options and the value of different payment methods, I think we’ll see flexibility being demanded, though we don’t want to go as far as parts of Asia, with a dozen different QR codes at the checkout! It’s certainly an important move by Walmart, but let’s be clear: they’re not doing it because of consumer pressure, that’s not how Walmart works. They’ve done it because they secured a favourable cost of transaction and got Walmart cards into the Apple Wallet. That’s their big win.
For more expert content on payments and innovation, subscribe to our newsletter or visit our Insights page.