Word: marts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Coup is one of the community bankers who have turned a routine regulatory application into a referendum on the world's biggest retailer. Wal-Mart submitted a filing last July asking the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the agency that guarantees bank deposits, to create a new entity called Wal-Mart Bank. It won't be a regular bank at all; the company says it will do nothing but process credit- and debit-card payments internally. But the application generated so many comment letters--3,600 and counting--that for the first time in its history, the FDIC decided...
...session last week near Washington attracted a parade of Wal-Mart's regular adversaries--unions, corporate activists, small-business owners--along with bankers, individuals and experts on both sides. But most comments came from rural America, so the agency will hold another session next week in Overland Park, Kans. Coup will testify there, along with other bankers who believe that their businesses will soon be the next to feel the weight of Wal-Mart...
...think about a Wal-Mart Bank with ATMs, branches and tellers. Jane Thompson, who would be chairman of Wal-Mart Bank, says the new bank would have a "very narrow role." Currently, every time a customer swipes a credit or debit card, Wal-Mart pays a fee to a bank for watching over the money for those few seconds as it moves between the customer's account and Wal-Mart's. By using its own bank, the company will save fractions of a penny on each transaction, yielding $5 million to $10 million a year, which it says...
...sales, says Terry Jorde, president and CEO of Country Bank USA in Cando, N.D. The fear, says Lawrence White, a professor of economics at New York University, is that the company will do to retail banking what it has done in apparel and groceries. Indeed, the application Wal-Mart filed would allow it to request a changed business plan through the FDIC without necessarily going through the entire process again...
...real threat to banks, say Wal-Mart supporters, is that the company might someday attack the financial industry's juicy fee structure. Even a critic like Jorde concedes that if Wal-Mart were to offer savings accounts and consumer loans at its usual rock-bottom prices, "the cost of banking services would decline, and consumers would say, 'This is great.'" Wal-Mart would also be in a good position to reach the 10 million households in the U.S. that don't use a bank account, says John Caskey, a professor of economics at Swarthmore and expert on the "unbanked...