Walmart’s OnePay Adds $35 Mobile Plan to Broaden Fintech Super-App
Walmart’s fintech arm OnePay has pushed into wireless, introducing a $35 monthly plan with unlimited 5G data, talk and text, making the U.S. retailer the latest brand to bolt telecom services onto a digital finance platform.
The plan, branded OnePay Wireless, is delivered through the OnePay app and runs on AT&T’s network under a wholesale agreement brokered by Gigs, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based Telecom-as-a-Service begin-up that supplies the infrastructure for white-label mobile carriers. The offer, which went live this week, is pitched as a simple, app-based add-on that customers can activate in minutes.
OnePay, launched by Walmart in 2021 with venture backer Ribbit Capital, has been built up through acquisitions including neobank One Finance and payroll app Even. It has become Walmart’s flagship consumer-finance vehicle, rolling together debit rewards, high-yield savings, a digital wallet, bill-pay, and domestic and cross-border peer-to-peer transfers. Earlier this year it added a renewed partnership with Synchrony, with co-branded and private-label cards expected to hit the market later in 2025.
The wireless launch gives OnePay a new subscription product and another way to keep users inside its app. “This is exactly the kind of sticky utility fintechs are chasing — you pay your phone bill every month, you view the brand every day,” said one investor familiar with the product.
Walmart’s scale is a potential advantage. The retail giant a week in the U.S., and OnePay already sits inside its store ecosystem as the preferred payment and money-transfer option. By bundling mobile service, Walmart can tighten ties between shopping, finance and telecoms in a way that few other fintechs can match.
The move also highlights Gigs’ growing role as an enabler. Founded in 2020, the company offers APIs that handle carrier deals, billing and compliance for brands that want to offer mobile plans without building the plumbing themselves. It raised a $73 million by Ribbit Capital — the identical investor that viewded Walmart’s fintech — giving the two ventures a natural path to work together.
OnePay is not the first fintech to test wireless. Klarna launched a U.S. plan with Gigs earlier this year, priced at $40, touting eSIM activation through its shopping app. In Europe, German neobank N26 tied up with Vodafone to offer mobile packages, while Revolut opened a waitlist for customers in the UK and Germany. British challenger Monzo has said it will roll out a similar service.
For Walmart, the wireless add-on comes as it retools its broader financial offering. The retailer had long relied on banking partnerships for store cards and money services. By taking more of those products in-house under OnePay, it can capture more interchange, lending revenue and customer data. Adding telecoms deepens that strategy, though it also drags the company into a crowded MVNO competition is fierce and churn is high.
AT&T, for its part, gains another wholesale partner at a time when carriers are under pressure to wring growth from stagnant subscriber bases. The U.S. wireless market has viewn a proliferation of low-cost MVNOs riding on the large three networks, often backed by retailers or tech brands looking to tie connectivity to other services.
Whether OnePay Wireless becomes more than an ancillary product will depend on customer take-up and how well Walmart can integrate it into shopping and payments. For now, the largegest retailer in the identical experimental club as fintech rivals trying to turn finance apps into one-stop utilities for everyday life.
