Exclusive: Target in initial development of own mobile wallet - sources
Target Corp is in the early stages of developing its own mobile wallet, three people familiar with the matter said, joining Wal-Mart Stores Inc in posing a threat to recent entrants like Apple Pay.
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after Walmart began rolling out Walmart Pay in select US stores, Target is reported to be building its own wallet — meaning the two largest US general merchandisers would each control the checkout tap rather than rent it from Apple or a bank consortium. The move answers Apple Pay's retail entry with a merchant-owned counter, keeping card-present data and loyalty inside the retailer's app.
The corpus shows where this went: Target shipped its in-app Wallet feature on iOS and Android in 2017, Walmart layered in more payment partners through talks that produced Chase Pay on Walmart Pay, and nearly a decade later Walmart agreed to adopt contactless hardware supporting Apple Pay and Google Pay — the arc this 2015 story sits at the start of.
First-order effects
- Apple Pay and other new entrants lose exclusive access to checkout at Target if it ships its own wallet, repeating the exclusions Walmart already imposed via Walmart Pay.
- Target keeps payment credentials, purchase data, and redemption of its own offers inside one app, converting checkout from an Apple-controlled tap into a Target-controlled session.
Second-order effects
- Wallet firms and card issuers are pushed into partnership deals with retailers rather than around them — the path Walmart took when negotiating additional payment options beyond its own wallet.
- Rival merchants face pressure to match proprietary wallets to avoid ceding checkout data to competitors, spreading the merchant-wallet model across big-box retail.
Third-order effects
- If retailer-owned wallets had become the norm, NFC-based wallets like Apple Pay would have been locked out of the highest-volume US stores; instead, the corpus's endpoint — Walmart accepting Tap to Pay with Apple Pay and Google Pay by end of 2026 — suggests proprietary wallets functioned as bargaining chips before conceding to interoperable contactless.
The trend: US big-box retail spent a decade building proprietary store wallets to resist Apple Pay, only to converge back on interoperable contactless payments once leverage was exhausted.