Tag Archives: walmart

Amazon vs Walmart: Two Very Different Bets on Agentic Commerce

Posted on by
Reply

Amazon and Walmart are the two dominant forces in US retail. They are also taking fundamentally different approaches to agentic commerce — and those differences will shape how payments, checkout, and consumer trust get redesigned over the next three years. This divergence has direct implications for card networks, payment processors, authentication infrastructure, and anyone building for the future of checkout.

Amazon: Closed Stack, Agentic Inside-Out

Amazon is building agentic commerce from the inside out — embedding AI agents deep into its own proprietary infrastructure and deliberately keeping external agents at arm’s length. The strategy is control through ownership.

Continue reading →

Walmart and Open AI

Posted on by
1

Quick Take

© Starpoint LLP, 2024. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients). 

This week: Walmart announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate shopping directly into ChatGPT, complete with an Instant Checkout feature. The market reacted instantly, driving WMT stock up over 5%. If you weren’t already paying attention to agentic commerce, you should be now.

For experts in payments and eCommerce, this deal is the ultimate realization of Walmart’s Everyday Low Prices (ELP) strategy. ELP is their cornerstone, and when you lead on price, you can afford to be channel agnostic. Walmart is signaling that they will be everywhere the customer is buying.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please . Not a Member? Join Us

Walmart – Banking and FinTech

Posted on by
2

As always pardon the typos

It seems like only yesterday that 30 members of Congress wrote the acting chairman of the FDIC to stop Walmart Bank.

“Wal-Mart’s plan, to have its bank process hundreds of billions in transactions for its own stores, could threaten the stability of the nation’s payments system,”

30 Members of US Congress, March 2006

Of course, we all know that Walmart pursued a different course to deliver services. Partnerships (MGI, Moneygram, Paypal, …) and banking in a box (literally an isle with prepaid cards). Most analysts discount or “write off” Walmart’s achievements in financial services.  Given Walmart doesn’t break out financial performance of Money Center, analysts are left with the tea leaves of MGI and GDOT reports. There is little doubt that comparing Money Center financial metrics to tier 1 banks would leave most unimpressed. However, Walmart has created a portfolio of banking services that supports their overall retail strategy and creates overwhelming loyalty amongst their core customer base.  

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please . Not a Member? Join Us