Raphael Stevens

Walmart’s majority-owned fintech startup OnePay said Monday that it was launching a pair of new credit cards for customers of the world’s biggest retailer.
To do so, OnePay is partnering with Synchrony, a major behind-the-scenes player in retail cards, which will issue the cards and handle underwriting decisions starting in the fall, the companies said.
OnePay, which was created by Walmart in 2021 with venture firm Ribbit Capital, will handle the customer experience for the card program through its mobile app.

A Capital One Walmart credit card sign is seen at a store in Mountain View, California, United States on Tuesday, November 19, 2019.
Yichuan Cao | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Walmart’s majority-owned fintech startup OnePay said Monday it was launching a pair of credit cards with a bank partner for customers of the world’s biggest retailer.
OnePay is partnering with Synchrony, a major behind-the-scenes player in retail cards, which will issue the cards and handle underwriting decisions starting in the fall, the companies said.

OnePay, which was created by Walmart in 2021 with venture firm Ribbit Capital, will handle the customer experience for the card program through its mobile app.
Walmart had leaned on Capital One as the exclusive provider of its credit cards since 2018, but sued the bank in 2023 so that it could exit the relationship years ahead of schedule. At the time, Capital One accused Walmart of seeking to end its partnership so that it could move transactions to OnePay.
The Walmart card program had 10 million customers and roughly $8.5 billion in loans outstanding last year, when the partnership with Capital One ended, according to Fitch Ratings.
For Walmart and its fintech firm, the arrangement shows that, in seeking to quickly scale up in financial services, OnePay is opting to partner with established players rather than going it alone.
In March, OnePay announced that it was tapping Swedish fintech firm Klarna to handle buy now, pay later loans at the retailer, even after testing its own installment loan program.

One-stop shop

In its quest to become a one-stop shop for Americans underserved by traditional banks, OnePay has methodically built out its offerings, which now include debit cards, high-yield savings accounts and a digital wallet with peer-to-peer payments.
OnePay is rolling out two options: a general purpose credit card that can be used anywhere Mastercard is accepted and a store card that will only allow Walmart purchases.
Customers whose credit profiles don’t allow them to qualify for the general purpose card will be offered the store card, according to a person with knowledge of the program who declined to be identified speaking ahead of the product’s launch.
OnePay hasn’t yet disclosed the rewards expected for making purchases with the cards. The Synchrony partnership was reported earlier by Bloomberg.
“Our goal with this credit card program is to deliver an experience for consumers that’s transparent, rewarding, and easy to use,” OnePay CEO Omer Ismail said in the Monday release.
“We’re excited to be partnering with Synchrony to launch a program at Walmart that checks each of those boxes and will help serve millions of people,” Ismail said.
Read more: Klarna, nearing IPO, plucks lucrative Walmart fintech partnership from rival Affirm

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In the grim pandemic years, people got used to staying inside. Outlays on services, including everything from restaurant meals and foreign travel to elective medical care, collapsed. Demand for goods jumped, with a rush for computers and exercise bikes. Such patterns proved remarkably resilient even as life got back to normal. In 2023 we called people spending in this manner “hermit consumers”. More

People wait in line for T-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an initial public offering earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Robinhood shares sold off on Monday as the online brokerage was snubbed in the latest quarterly rebalance of the S&P 500 after months of speculation that it could earn a coveted spot in the benchmark.
Shares of Robinhood dropped more than 3% in premarket trading. The stock rallied 3.3% on Friday to bring last week’s gain to more than 13% before S&P Dow Jones Indices said after the bell that the S&P 500 would remain unchanged.

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Just last week, Bank of America called Robinhood a top candidate to join the S&P 500 during the big reshuffling in June. The S&P 500 rebalance, which typically comes on the third Friday of the last month in a quarter, is usually an impactful event as it can spark billions of dollars of trading and spur passive funds to snap up its shares. Companies being added to the index can generally expect funds like that to buy huge amounts of their shares in the coming weeks.
Crypto exchange Coinbase was the latest beneficiary of such an inclusion. The stock skyrocketed 24% in the next trading session following the announcement last month.
Still, Robinhood has had a major comeback this year so far with shares doubling in price. The online brokerage’s shares hit a fresh record high last week amid a rebound in both stocks and crypto. The company had fallen out of favor after the GameStop trading mania of 2021 fizzled and the collapse of FTX triggered a sell-off in digital assets.

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It’s a tough market for job seekers, especially recent graduates, experts said.
Employers are hiring at the slowest pace in more than a decade, even as unemployment and layoffs are relatively low.
Don’t underestimate the power of building personal connections and networking while hunting for a job, one expert said.

Nitat Termmee | Moment | Getty Images

The U.S. job market isn’t looking too hot for recent college graduates and other job seekers, according to economists and labor experts.
“The job market is kind of trash right now,” said Mandi Woodruff-Santos, a career coach and personal finance expert.

“I mean, it’s really difficult,” she added. “It’s really difficult for people who have many years of experience, so it’s going to be difficult for college kids.”

‘Tough summer’ for job seekers

That may seem counterintuitive.
The national unemployment rate in May was relatively low, at 4.2%. The layoff rate has also been historically low, suggesting employers are holding on to their workers.
Yet, hiring has been anemic. The pace of employer hiring in April was the lowest in more than 10 years, since August 2014, excluding the early months of the Covid pandemic.
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The rate at which workers are quitting — a barometer of worker confidence about their job prospects — has also plummeted to below pre-pandemic levels, a stark reversal from the “great resignation” in 2021 and 2022.
“It will be a tough summer for anyone looking for full-time work,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote in an e-mail Friday.
“This is an ‘abundance of caution economy’ where businesses are only filling critical positions and job seekers, especially recent graduates, are struggling to find employment,” she said.

Steady job market erosion ‘cannot continue forever’

While the job market may be limping along by some measures, Long also said a recession doesn’t seem “imminent.”
Businesses added more jobs than expected in May, for example. But those gains have slowed significantly — a worrisome sign, economists said.
Employers appear reluctant to hire in an uncertain economy.

CEO confidence plummeted in the second quarter of 2025, seeing its largest quarterly decline on record dating to 1976, according to a survey by The Conference Board. Uncertainty around geopolitical instability, trade and tariff policy were the largest business risks, according to Roger Ferguson Jr., the group’s chair emeritus.
The share of CEOs expecting to expand their workforce fell slightly, to 28% in Q2 from 32% in Q1, and the share planning to cut their workforce rose 1 point, to 28%. 

“The steady erosion in the US job market cannot continue forever — at some point, there will just not be much left to give,” Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, wrote in an analysis Friday.
“In a low-hiring, slow-growth environment, employers can only hold onto their existing employees for so long before they too will have to be let go — increasing unemployment even as job opportunities continue to shrink,” Stahle wrote.

Don’t underestimate personal connections

Don’t underestimate the “power of personal connections” to help get noticed in a competitive job market like this one, said Woodruff-Santos, the career coach.
Her No. 1 piece of advice: Make yourself “uncomfortable” in order to network and build professional relationships.
“You need to put yourself in situations where you may not know everybody, you may not know one person, where you may actually need someone to give you a bit of a helping hand, and to feel confident and OK doing that,” Woodruff-Santos said.

If you’re pushed to accept a job you don’t love to make ends meet, make a plan to keep current in the field to which you aspire, she said.
In other words, build the skills that will eventually help you get that job, perhaps by taking a training course, getting a certificate or doing contract work, she said. Also, consider joining a professional organization, putting yourself in the same room as people in your desired field and with whom you can connect, she said.
These steps raise your chances of getting attention from future employers and keeping your skills sharp, Woodruff-Santos said.
She also had some words of encouragement.
“The job market has been trash before,” she said. “It’ll be trash again. This probably won’t be your first trash job market. And you’re going to be OK.” More

The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority announced the Supercharged Sandbox, a partnership with Nvidia that aims to help banks safely experiment with AI.
The initiative is designed for financial services firms in the “discovery and experiment phase” with AI, the FCA said.
Banks have faced challenges shipping advanced new AI tools to their customers due to concerns over risks they pose around privacy and fraud.

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

LONDON — Britain’s financial services watchdog on Monday announced a new tie-up with U.S. chipmaker Nvidia to let banks safely experiment with artificial intelligence.
The Financial Conduct Authority said it will launch a so-called Supercharged Sandbox that will “give firms access to better data, technical expertise and regulatory support to speed up innovation.”

Starting from October, financial services institutions in the U.K. will be allowed to experiment with AI using Nvidia’s accelerated computing and AI Enterprise Software products, the watchdog said in a press release.
The initiative is designed for firms in the “discovery and experiment phase” with AI, the FCA noted, adding that a separate live testing service exists for firms further along in AI development.

“This collaboration will help those that want to test AI ideas but who lack the capabilities to do so,” Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data, intelligence and information officer, said in a statement. “We’ll help firms harness AI to benefit our markets and consumers, while supporting economic growth.”
The FCA’s new sandbox addresses a key issue for banks, which have faced challenges shipping advanced new AI tools to their customers amid concerns over risks around privacy and fraud.
Large language models from the likes of OpenAI and Google send data back to overseas facilities — and privacy regulators have raised the alarm over how this information is stored and processed. There have meanwhile been several instances of malicious actors using generative AI to scam people.

Nvidia is behind the graphics processing units, or GPUs, used to train and run powerful AI models. The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, is expected to give a keynote talk at a tech conference in London on Monday morning.
Last year, HSBC’s generative AI lead, Edward Achtner, told a London tech conference he sees “a lot of success theater” in finance when it comes to artificial intelligence — hinting that some financial services firms are touting advances in AI without tangible product innovations to show for it.
He added that, while banks like HSBC have used AI for many years, new generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT come with their own unique compliance risks. More