Walmart’s fintech partner helps break its payment cycle

Bloomberg

Walmart Inc.’s employees have adopted money-management tools from Even Responsible Finance Inc. at a faster pace than anticipated, prompting a fresh round of funding to expand the fintech startup.
More than 200,000 Walmart employees in the US use Even’s app to manage their finances or access their wages early, the Oakland-based startup said, and almost half of that group employs it every day. That’s ahead of Even’s projections, prompting interest from other big employers and leading to a $40 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures, the venture-capital firm that also backs grocery-delivery service Instacart and spacecraft maker Rocket Lab.
“We’ve been very surprised by the uptake — we anticipated that we would get to 200,000 by the end of the year,” CEO Jon Schlossberg said. “It’s blown away what we expected in terms of engagement.”
Walmart entered the partnership with Even and another fintech startup, PayActiv Inc., in December. The arrangement lets Walmart’s about 1.5 million US employees access earned wages ahead of scheduled paychecks, avoiding bounced checks or payday lenders. About three out of four full-time workers live paycheck to paycheck, according to workplace site CareerBuilder, and studies from the Federal Reserve show a lack of emergency savings among many US households.
Daniel Eckert, Walmart’s senior vice president of services and digital acceleration, said in the statement that the service is a “tremendous benefit” that helps set the employer apart.
Walmart’s adoption of Even’s financial app — which connects directly to bank accounts and calculates imminent expenses to show users how much they’re able to spend at any given moment — has led to interest from other big companies who’d like to offer the service to their employees, said Schlossberg.
The inability to weather an unexpected car repair bill or medical expense can send a low-income worker into a debt spiral, and financially stressed workers can be less engaged and not as productive.
Walmart subsidises about 25 percent of Even’s monthly subscription fee.