Co-Found With the Incumbent

A fourth option

Working with a giant incumbent is usually treated as a choice among three structures: sell it a vendor contract, get acquired by it, or compete head on for the distribution it already owns. Micky Malka's Ribbit Capital took a fourth path with Walmart on OnePay, co-founding a jointly owned company with its own new brand, its own operators, and its own acquisitions to build out the infrastructure.¹ Not a vendor relationship, where the incumbent's attention never really arrives because the partner is a line item in someone else's budget. Not an acquisition, where the acquired team simply inherits the acquirer's existing priority stack, the same problem it was meant to solve. A new entity, jointly owned, gets distribution from day one instead of spending years building the distribution the incumbent already has.

How the relationship was built

The sequence is concrete enough to be worth copying. It started with a 2019 dinner in San Francisco arranged by a mutual connection then on Walmart's board, followed by a casual invitation to visit the company's Arkansas headquarters. Malka's team did its diligence on the retail floor: they visited Walmart stores and bought every financial product sold there, remittances, prepaid cards, bill pay, and found bugs. The verdict was that the offering looked like 1990s fintech, assembled from outside vendors around a house-branded card, a thesis visible without ever seeing an internal document. A cold letter followed in January 2020, asking to come back, and the answer was yes.

The pitch that unlocked it

The part worth keeping is not the product plan but the single sentence that made the deal possible: an honest statement of relative priority, that Walmart could build something much better in financial services, but that this was not the retailer's priority number one, two, or three, while it was Ribbit's only priority. The sentence concedes the incumbent's real constraint out loud, which is attention rather than capability or capital, and proposes a structure where the incumbent supplies the asset it has in surplus, distribution, while the partner supplies the one it cannot allocate, obsessive focus. Nobody in the room has to admit inferiority, which is usually what kills this kind of conversation before it starts.

Why Walmart, specifically, could see it

The enabling asset was pattern recognition rather than money. A Walmart executive had spent years in China watching WeChat Pay and Alipay reshape consumer finance around mobile money, and the company already owned Flipkart and PhonePe in India, so it had watched the same transition happen twice before it happened at home. The structure only works where a real asymmetry of attention exists: an incumbent has to own something enormous that it genuinely cannot prioritize, in Walmart's case a hundred million customers walking past a dated financial-product shelf that nobody's bonus depended on improving. Where that asymmetry is absent, there is no unclaimed attention for a new entity to inherit, and the pitch collapses back into an ordinary vendor conversation.