The Financial Relationship Retailers Keep Giving Away

Most retailers invest heavily in customer acquisition, personalized experiences, and loyalty schemes. But they’re overlooking a strategic asset: customer financial relationships.

The financial journey that happens before, during and after purchase is one of the most important steps in the customer journey. And it often runs on a third party’s logo and infrastructure they don’t control.  Every checkout, refund, financing decision, and stored balance interaction shapes how customers engage with a brand. These moments influence convenience, trust, and repeat purchasing behavior. They also generate insights that can help retailers better understand and serve their customers.

The cost of that handoff is easiest to measure at checkout. In a February 2024 study of 3,521 US shoppers, PYMNTS Intelligence and Adobe found that 70% call the availability of their preferred payment method "very" or "extremely" influential in deciding where they shop¹; where they take their business in the first place, before they reach a cart. Payment friction kills conversions at checkout, but the data says it's also steering customers to competitors before they ever visit. Baymard's aggregate of 50 studies puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.2%², with top reasons after "just browsing" as too long, too complicated, too few payment options, forced account creation. Known customers bounce when logging in gets in the way too.

A wallet makes the relationship sticky across everyday needs

Picture a repeat customer at the pay screen: a branded wallet already knows they’ve tried this line twice before, drops the loyalty points they’re owed onto the order, and completes the purchase in one tap because the customer’s credential lives with the brand. Route the customer through a generic checkout instead, and that value-added financial experience gets lost. The retailer gets a settled transaction, but someone else captures the rich financial relationship data.

A branded wallet closes the gap. When the same wallet holds stored balances, handles refunds more quickly by sending payments back to consumer cards, offers financing at the point of sale, and lets customers move money in and out on their terms, the financial relationship becomes the connective tissue across a customer's everyday life. The retailer supports how the customer manages money, and the purchase is one transaction in a richer relationship.

The retailer that provides this infrastructure is better positioned to capture customer engagement, loyalty, and economic value over time. Clear proof points are already running at scale, with large brands deciding how much of the financial relationship they want to manage.

Starbucks turned payments into a daily habit

In its Q1 fiscal 2024 results, Starbucks reported that Mobile Order and Pay reached a record 30% of their US transactions, and that Starbucks Rewards tender hit an all-time high of 59% of US company-operated sales.³ More than half of Starbucks revenue now moves through the company's own stored-payment system and spend per member reached a record high in the same quarter.

The wallet brings people back more often and concentrates their spending with one brand. The payoff is frequency and retention, compounded over time.

The wallet also reliably closes more sales from the same traffic. Removing checkout friction with a saved credential moves completion rates by double digits in published vendor data.⁴ A customer who checks out faster and converts more often is worth more over a year than one with a slightly bigger one-time order. The economics are behavioral, and they favor whoever owns the checkout credential.

Walmart made the wallet a financial hub

Starbucks demonstrates the checkout and loyalty loop. Walmart shows what the wallet can enable when a brand handles a customer's entire financial life.

Walmart invested in OnePay to deliver the full financial relationship to their customers.⁵ Picture how the pieces connect for a Walmart+ member: they buy groceries with their OnePay CashRewards card and earn 5% back automatically. The cashback lands in their OnePay high-yield savings account. Two weeks later, they need a new TV, and they finance it through OnePay Pay Later at checkout, and every on-time installment builds their credit history through the same app. Their deposit account is the hub: required to open investing (stocks, crypto), required for the credit-builder card, required for early pay on their paycheck. Every product pulls the customer deeper into a single financial relationship that Walmart orchestrates through OnePay.

OnePay has attracted millions of customers with consistently high app ratings. The platform makes Walmart the center of how its customers handle money, across shopping, saving, credit, and investing, with the latter offering infrastructure that moves both fiat and crypto under one roof.

Choosing the right banking infrastructure

Shipping your own version of what Walmart has built depends on the banking infrastructure underneath, including: tracking financial transactions, payment flows, cards, and compliance.  Most brands don't want to do all that work, and partnering poorly can fragment the experience into multiple apps and logins.

Upgrade, a prominent consumer fintech, did it right when they launched the Upgrade Card on Cross River's issuance and payment APIs. They then added Rewards Checking on the same infrastructure and with the same bank partnership.⁶ Card, deposit account, and the compliance around both were built on one integrated relationship rather than three vendor contracts stitched together. From there Upgrade expanded to four financial products and has facilitated more than $32 billion in consumer loans since 2019, all running through that single bank and technology partnership rather than a separate integration for each product.

That model scales across financial product stacks a retailer would want to build. The alternative is stitching together three vendors with three separate compliance reviews and three points of failure, often killing a wallet project before it launches.

The gap is widest in Q4

Most retailers sublet their valuable customer financial relationships. Participating more directly in the financial relationship can help retailers convert more traffic they already paid for and keeps the behavioral data that sharpens the customer experience over time.

That gap is widest in the fourth quarter, when expensive holiday traffic moves through infrastructure the retailer doesn't control. Changing that infrastructure takes planning, so the decision for next peak season is happening now. The retailers moving early will own customer data that gets sharper with every transaction, while the rest will keep renting it back.

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Cross River provides the card issuing, deposit, and compliance infrastructure retailers use to launch branded wallet and payment programs without becoming a bank. Get in touch to learn more.

1. PYMNTS Intelligence and Adobe, "Consumer Interest in Alternative Payment Methods," February 2024 (n=3,521 US consumers): 70% of consumers say availability of their preferred payment method is "very" or "extremely" influential in deciding where they shop.

2. Baymard Institute, cart abandonment aggregate across 50 studies (average documented rate 70.22%). baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate.

3. Starbucks Corporation, Q1 fiscal year 2024 earnings call (January 30, 2024)

4. Vendor-reported figures for generic saved-credential checkout (not branded-wallet-specific): Stripe Link (~14% conversion lift among returning users); Shopify Shop Pay (up to 50% higher checkout completion vs. guest checkout, per Shopify-cited third-party analysis).

5. Walmart / OnePay (onepay.com): Integrates with Walmart+ to offer 5% cash back on Walmart purchases for members, buy-now-pay-later for Walmart shopping, high-yield savings, credit building, stock/crypto investing, and digital wallet rewards. OnePay reports serving millions of customers; 4.9-star Apple App Store rating; 151,000+ Google Play reviews.

6. Cross River / Upgrade case study (2026), crossriver.com/case-study/upgrade