Will Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Really Give Banks A Run For Their Money?

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.’s WMT plan to partner with prepaid-card company, Green Dot Corporation GDOT to offer checking accounts to unbanked Wal-Mart customers is the retail giant's latest effort to enter the financial sector.

Wal-Mart's previous attempts had U.S. banks seeking to block the company’s efforts. Are they similarly worried this time?

Past Resistance

As Bloomberg reported, past attempts by Wal-Mart to obtain a bank charter met stiff resistance from both established U.S. lenders and labor. The company abandoned those efforts in 2007.

The primary argument against Wal-Mart was that it was not subject to the same types of financial regulation as traditional financial institutions.

Because of this, banks said, Wal-Mart would have an unfair advantage and be able to do what Wal-Mart has always done best — undercut competitors’ prices.

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A Contrarian View

Marketfy Maven, Tim Melvin told Benzinga he did not believe Wal-Mart’s current plan would raise the ire of most bankers.

From Melvin’s perspective, the reason was baked into Wal-Mart's target demographic.

“The unbanked market is unbanked for good reason,” Melvin said. “Many of them cannot open accounts due to bad credit and unpaid fees from previous relationships. This is not a segment of the market that is likely to obtain home loans, credit cards or [be in] other lending markets.”

Melvin even saw a potential upside for the traditional banking sector, based on Wal-Mart’s entry into the sector.

“If they [Wal-Mart] are successful in helping the un-banked actually become account holders and use them to properly manage their finances,” Melvin said, “this is probably a solid positive for the industry as a whole.”

Data Collection

Looking at it from Wal-Mart’s perspective, Melvin said he suspected the company would find the information gathered on their new banking customers – i.e., income levels and spending habits - would be “far more profitable for them than the actual banking relationships would be.”

The notion of providing a service, even one that barely makes a profit, for the purpose of data collection is not new to the marketplace. One only has to look at Amazon.com, Inc..

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A Bigger Threat

As far as a challenge to traditional banking is concerned – especially for smaller regional and community banks - Melvin said he suspected Apple Inc.’s AAPL iPay would turn out to be a much bigger problem.

To the extent iPay ended up driving customers, especially those with more favorable demographics, to larger banks that would be especially true, Melvin said.

At the time of this writing, Jim Probasco  had no position in any mentioned securities.