Walmart Taps Citi Exec As VP Of Financial Services

Walmart has hired Julia Unger to serve in the position of vice president of financial services. Unger will report to Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside, and her first day will be Monday (April 12), according to a memo.

“[Unger] has impressive experience developing innovative consumer finance services while also delivering strong business results,” Whiteside said in the memo.

Unger comes to Walmart after spending over two decades at Citi, where she most recently headed up global strategy for credit cards, payments, lending and loyalty platforms, among other efforts.

“I am particularly excited about Julia’s track record of working across business lines and geographies — at Citi, she translated insights into digital strategies that fostered innovation, partnership and identified new opportunities across the B2B and B2C spaces,” Whiteside said in the memo.

As previously reported, news that Walmart hired two executives away from Goldman to become a part of the retailer’s FinTech effort put a spotlight on the attractiveness and challenges of building out super apps — and particularly of bringing banking into the mix.

For its part, Walmart brought Goldman executives David Stark and Omer Ismail onboard. Ismail had formally taken on the control of the consumer bank at the beginning of this year and had been playing a major role with creating the strategy for Goldman’s digital “main street” banking efforts via Marcus.

Stark had been working with the bank on its credit card initiatives with Apple.

Separately, in January, Walmart announced that it is forming a FinTech upstart. The company said in an announcement that is building the startup alongside Ribbit Capital.

“The venture will bring together Walmart’s retail knowledge and scale with Ribbit’s FinTech expertise to deliver tech-driven financial experiences tailored to Walmart’s customers and associates,” according to a press release at the time.

Walmart said at the time that it would keep serving customers via its current financial services and partnerships with different third parties.