After hinting, testing and piloting for a long time, the retail giant has finally rolled out the application.
The fact that Walmart had a mobile payments app up its sleeve is coming as a surprise to absolutely nobody as it has been talking about it, testing it and running pilot programs for some time now, but what is making headlines is the final rollout of the application and the way competitors in this sphere are being treated.
This is the largest effort the retailer has made to try to bump Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay and others.
The concept behind Walmart Pay is essentially the same as the other large mobile payments apps that are currently available to its customers, except that the retail giant is switching things around a little bit in the hopes of making sure shoppers will choose its option first. The mobile wallets from Apple and Android are all reliant on NFC technology in order to provide fast, secure and contactless transactions with smartphones (Samsung uses near field communication tech, too, but it is also compatible with magnetic strip readers).
Walmart’s mobile payments app has diverted from that trend and is using QR codes instead.
In this way, the QR codes are scanned at the checkout terminal so that the payments can be made through whichever credit card account the user has connected to the Walmart Pay mobile app.
The efforts this company has been making in order to develop its own mobile wallet have become rather controversial as the retailer had previously committed to the CurrentC transaction method. Now, it looks as though CurrentC has only been added to the list of competitors going up against Walmart in the mobile payments application category.
CurrentC is designed to allow users of this transaction method to avoid any transaction fees that would be imposed by tech companies or banks, allowing it to stand out from the competition. That said, with the creation and launch of Walmart Pay, there has been some question as to whether or not the retail giant’s heart is truly invested in its prior commitment to CurrentC.
Upon the initial launch of the Walmart mobile payments app, users of the iPhone 6 and newer have the application available to them, though there has been no word as to precisely when Android users would also have the app available.
