- OnePay has 6 million monthly active users and $50 billion in annualized payments — both figures doubled year over year — with a $4 billion valuation from investors; it has ~600 employees and is outgrowing its Tribeca, NYC headquarters
- The app combines debit and credit card loading, cash-back rewards, a checking account, a crypto investment platform, and buy-now-pay-later — targeting Walmart’s 1.6M US employees and 230M weekly shoppers as its primary distribution channel
- Among Walmart-channel signups, two-thirds go on to add at least one more OnePay financial product — a cross-sell rate that rivals the best consumer fintech incumbents
- Over 80% of OnePay debit card spending occurs outside of Walmart, and 10%+ of customers are acquired outside the retailer — the app is already proving it can grow beyond its Walmart moat
What Happened?
OnePay — the fintech joint venture between Walmart and Ribbit Capital’s Micky Malka — has been growing quietly but is emerging as one of the most credible challenges to traditional US retail banking. The company doubled monthly active users to 6 million and doubled annualized payments to $50 billion in a year. Ribbit’s Malka pitched the concept to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon in 2019, arguing Walmart had brand trust and distribution but no modern financial services to match. The venture was announced in 2021, poaching a Goldman Sachs Marcus leadership team (including Marcus head Omer Ismail) to run it. Walmart employees can now open a direct-deposit OnePay account “in two clicks and 20 seconds,” unlocking high-yield savings and early paycheck access.
Why It Matters?
Walmart tried to become a bank directly in the early 2000s and was blocked by industry opposition. OnePay is the workaround: not a bank charter, but a fintech operating through banking partners (Coastal Community Bank and Lead Bank), offering bank-like services at Walmart’s unparalleled distribution scale. The US has no WeChat Pay equivalent — no app that owns a consumer’s entire financial life the way Tencent’s platform does in China. OnePay is the most credible attempt yet, combining the world’s largest retailer’s data and trust with Ribbit’s fintech pedigree (Coinbase, Robinhood, Nubank, Revolut). The fact that 80%+ of debit spending and 10%+ of new customers already come from outside Walmart suggests the super-app flywheel is beginning to spin independently of the retail anchor.
What’s Next?
OnePay is exploring partnerships with payroll platforms UKG and Workday to recruit employees of other large companies through direct-deposit onboarding — the same lever that worked with Walmart’s 1.6M US workers. If that playbook scales, OnePay’s addressable market expands dramatically beyond Walmart. The company has no bank charter ambitions for now, which limits regulatory exposure but also caps certain product capabilities. Watch for an IPO — the $4B valuation and rapid growth metrics make OnePay a natural candidate for a public offering in the same AI-and-fintech IPO wave that SpaceX and Anthropic are riding. Incumbents like JPMorgan and Bank of America have reason to monitor: Malka’s track record at Coinbase and Nubank suggests he knows how to grow a fintech to bank-scale without looking like one until it’s too late.
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
