- The Walmart-backed fintech venture Hazel acquired One in January and adopted its moniker.
- The neobank has since removed popular features like Pocket creation and credit lines, customers say.
- One customers told Insider they had received little to no notice on features being removed.
Lindsey Gastley and her husband missed a mortgage payment on their Atlanta-area home in October.
She said it’s her bank’s fault.
Gastley opened a One bank account in April 2021, inspired by promises from the San Francisco online-only bank, or neobank, that it would emulate features from her previous bank Simple, such as generous credit lines and in-app budgeting tools.
But once the Walmart-backed fintech venture Hazel acquired One and adopted its moniker in January, some of the features that drew Gastley to the bank disappeared. One by one, the neobank got rid of Gastley’s credit line, discontinued a cash-back program with the shopping app Fetch, and changed the app’s user interface to be less user-friendly — all with very little to no notice, Gastley said.
Worse, Gastley hasn’t recently been able to complete ACH payments, or electronic money transfers, through her One bank account, she said. Last month alone, she said One declined two of her credit-card payments, one of her husband’s credit-card payments, and their mortgage payment, even though they had “more than enough” in their respective Pockets, or virtual bank accounts, to make each payment.
Now the couple are ready to give up on One. They worry the company is sacrificing a host of budgeting features and personalization tools that were a major draw for them and others for expansion and different users.
She’s not alone.
Insider spoke with 10 current and former One customers who expressed similar frustrations over product changes and described fears of being left behind as One execs turned their attention to a massive, new user base: Walmart’s 1.6 million employees and 100 million-strong customers, according to a press release announcing the tie-up. Some customers requested to be identified only by their first names in order to protect their privacy.
They are just one small part of a growing group of long-standing One clientele airing their grievances on social media. A group on Reddit dedicated to One, r/OneFinance, has 4,400 members. The page has become, in some cases, the first place customers turn to for information about product changes.
One, meanwhile, has been the focus of media attention — because of its association with the nation’s largest retailer and because it has nabbed top talent from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Google, and Apple. Investment firm Ribbit Capital, which has backed Robinhood and other fintechs, was also a founding partner with Walmart of the fintech venture. (Like most neobanks, One has partnered with a sponsor bank, the Washington-based Coastal Community Bank, to provide financial services.)
“It’s confusing to watch Walmart acquire a bank like One — a bank that is trying to set itself apart from the big players in the banking industry — just to slowly and painfully tear away all of the features that made it sort of interesting,” Gastley told Insider.
To be sure, One is far from the only fintech to face challenges as it grows or gets acquired. What works for a customer base of thousands might be impossible to implement for millions. And some customers said they knew that it was inevitable that the One app would change as it outgrew an early, devoted set of users.
“Walmart is trying to build a product that will appeal to all of its customers, and if that makes existing One customers unhappy, that’s just the cost of doing business,” Alex Johnson, a fintech analyst and the writer of the Fintech Takes newsletter, told Insider.
A spokesperson for One declined to comment for this story.
Migrating from Simple and similar post-acquisition challenges
Like Gastley, many current One customers previously used Simple, a neobank that launched in 2012 and offered many of the same in-app budgeting tools once touted by One.
The US subsidiary of the Spanish bank BBVA bought Simple in 2018. BBVA USA ultimately chose to close down Simple in 2021 and move its customers entirely to its own service. At the time, customers reported difficulties accessing their accounts, The Verge and NerdWallet reported.
A current One customer who requested to be identified only by their first name, Erika, described to Insider their transition from Simple to BBVA as “awful,” saying they lost access to their bank account for several days. The Pittsburgh-based bank PNC acquired BBVA USA later in 2021.
Simple’s demise opened a door for One to grab new customers, an opportunity the bank pressed by touting its similarly minded budgeting features. In a January 2021 article in Forbes, Brian Hamilton, a cofounder and the CEO of One at the time, highlighted One’s Pocket feature and other customization tools for ex-Simple customers. The bank also touted on social media a $50 referral bonus for clients coming from Simple, all in what Erika described as a “really heavy marketing campaign.”
Walmart’s announcement in January to purchase One, then, was concerning for those who had moved from Simple. It’s not clear how many customers One had when it was acquired by Walmart, but Hamilton told TechCrunch in August 2021 that the banking app served “hundreds of thousands.”
Having been burned already by a bank acquisition, One users feared the same would happen again. Hamilton, who became the chief commercial officer of the startup post-acquisition, went as far as writing an email to customers to assure them the product wouldn’t change.
“We’re not going anywhere. The ONE you know and love is here for the long haul,” Hamilton wrote. “You’ll continue to enjoy the same great banking services, in the same ONE app you use and love now, and there will be no disruption in our services.”
No new shared Pockets and goodbye to Credit Manager
When Simple users made the move to One before its acquisition, they found a receptive audience.
“One were really listening to the customers, especially a lot of us that came over from Simple, and adding in features. It turned into a great product,” Tim, another One customer who asked to be identified only by their first name, said.
But in early August, roughly seven months after Walmart’s acquisition, One sent an email to customers and posted a notice to the website’s help page detailing the product changes associated with the revamped app.
Among the tools removed for current One customers was the ability to create Pockets, or virtual bank accounts that carried unique account numbers, and assign them to other One users. Legacy One customers were able to keep their existing Pockets and shared accounts, but an inability to create more virtual accounts, once a key differentiator for One, has struck at the core of users’ complaints.
Tim had proactively created roughly 75 Pockets before the product changes. But when his wife recently asked him to set an account aside so that the couple could begin saving for a conference she planned to attend, he found he was unable to — he’d forgotten to share them with his wife ahead of the changes to the One app. For Tim, the ability for him and his wife, with whom he shares everyday expenses, to draw from the same accounts had been a major benefit of One.
“It’s like the old saying: Fool me once, you know, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” Tim said. “When I hear about fintech and all of these companies trying to do different things in the financial world, I’m like, ‘You know what? I’ve been burned twice, and honestly, I don’t feel like I trust any of you.'”
Other features no longer live for all One customers include Pocket Protector, the app’s version of overdraft protection. Using Pocket Protector, One customers could use their Spend Pocket, or a main account that draws from a debit card, as a backup if they didn’t have sufficient funds in other accounts. (Pocket Protector is still live for those customers with qualifying direct deposit enabled.)
Credit Manager, an offering through which customers could monitor their credit scores, was also removed, as was Paycheck Autosave, a tool allowing users to automatically send a fixed amount directly from paycheck deposits to a high-yield savings account.
The removal of One’s overdraft-protection feature caught at least one customer, Anna, off guard.
Anna, who lives in Florida and asked to be identified only by her first name, and her partner had set up a shared Pocket to cover unplanned expenses. When a vehicle-toll payment was rejected in September after the removal of Pocket Protector, Anna was left scrambling to link a new card to make the payment.
“We loved One because it helped us budget. It helped us grow our money, and we were able to save more,” Anna said. “Now we’re just unsure. It’s not really an ideal place to be when thinking about finances.”
While the removal of some One features was abrupt, the terms-of-service agreements that customers sign with companies typically provide latitude for product changes within reason, one lawyer said.
According to One’s terms of service, the company has the right to alter its products as it sees fit. And it’s unlikely such changes rise to the level of “unconscionability” that Jeff Sovern, a St. John’s University School of Law professor, told Insider could determine whether the customers are protected against some contract provisions.
“There’s a ‘duty to read,’ an expectation that consumers will read the contract and if they don’t like it, not enter into it. Of course, everyone knows, and even judges have said, that they don’t read all the terms of their contracts,” Sovern said.
‘I was flabbergasted’: Unclear communication angers customers
Maeby Moore said she really enjoyed her experience with One before Walmart acquired it — so much so that she persuaded both her ex-partner and mom to sign up with the bank.
But then One customers received an email from the bank on May 12: It would be closing current credit lines, effective immediately. Moore, who lives in Chicago, said she did not receive that email and instead discovered the news on Reddit.
“There was no warning, which was particularly sneaky,” Moore said. “I think they did it that way to prevent people from moving their money out.”
Joseph, a One customer who asked to be identified only by their first name and lives in Savannah, Georgia, said he did receive that email about the disappearing credit line. But he said he did not receive an email in August notifying customers that they could no longer create Pockets.
That’s not the only change to Pockets for which Joseph, who has dozens of the virtual bank accounts, didn’t receive a notification about, he said. When the One app updated in September, the company got rid of fields where users entered descriptions for Pockets — which he used to keep track of when certain bills were due, he said.
When he asked One customer service about the change in an online conversation on September 20, a representative named Rachel said all the Pocket descriptions for each user were deleted.
“I understand that this issue is causing a lot of problems for you because you already had important information there,” Rachel said in a conversation with Joseph viewed by Insider. “But, please understand that there is nothing that we can do.”
Joseph responded to Rachel: “OMG you’re kidding me.”
“I was flabbergasted that a bank could legally delete so much information overnight with no warning and with no backup,” Joseph told Insider. “Thankfully, they looked further into it, and their IT was able to send me an Excel sheet of an archive of my Pocket descriptions.”
Scaling back customers and products
One is only one example of Walmart’s aggressive moves to acquire other companies and expand this year. As of mid-October, the company had made at least five acquisitions in 2022, according to the market-intelligence platform CB Insights. Those acquisitions have spread across categories, from fulfillment and delivery services to merchandising technology.
Since the January acquisition of One, the company has mostly acted behind the curtain, not giving too many details to the public about its strategy led by the Marcus alumnus Omer Ismail and other talent from blue-chip tech and finance companies like Apple and Google.
But the company seems poised to deploy its offering soon to Walmart’s customer and employee base. Bloomberg reported last month that it planned to beta test its checking accounts in the “coming weeks” with Walmart workers and online customers and that it would soon launch a cash-back feature for some purchases made with One’s debit card, including those at Walmart.
Gastley, who said One caused her to miss her mortgage payment, said the neobank appeared to be focused on having “as many customers as possible as quickly as possible” — even if that meant discarding some of the features popular with customers.
“It seems like Walmart doesn’t really care too much about keeping One’s old customers, unless those old customers are willing to scale back their expectations while Walmart scales back the product,” she said.
Gastley and her husband are not willing to scale back their expectations for what they saw as a once promising product. They are actively looking for a new bank, she said.
Got a tip? Carter Johnson can be reached by email at cjohnson@insider.com or via the encrypted app Signal or text at (646) 376-6028. Ben Tobin can be reached by email at btobin@insider.com or via the encrypted app Signal or text at (703) 498-9171.
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