Omer Ismail on Building America’s Financial Super App 

Financial super apps have been a dominant force in Asia for years. In the US, the model has been slower to take hold… until now. OnePay, a consumer financial services platform backed by Walmart and Ribbit Capital, is making a serious push to change things. With 6 million monthly active customers, a product suite spanning banking, credit, investing, crypto, and tax filing, and a distribution advantage that few fintech companies can match, OnePay is building what its CEO believes will be one of the defining financial platforms of the next decade. 

Omer Ismail joined Jefferies at the Private Growth Conference in Santa Monica, where he described the conference as “a great opportunity to network with other builders, hearing their stories, exchanging ideas, talking about trends in AI and the marketplace.” He sat down to discuss OnePay’s strategy, its use of AI, and why he thinks the next era of US fintech belongs to platforms. 

The US has lagged behind Asia on financial super apps. Why is OnePay different? 

If you think about fintech in the US over the last ten years, a lot of innovation happened, but most of it was point-to-point: single products, single features. Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), crypto, digital banking. We believe the next era of fintech in the US will be defined by platforms that help customers manage their money holistically. The companies that will win are the ones with access to tens of millions of customers and a broad product suite that compounds over time. 

The other piece is customer acquisition cost. That’s a very high expense line for almost every consumer fintech. Our answer to that is embedded distribution, primarily through Walmart, but also through HR ecosystems like UKG and Workday, where tens of millions of people go every day to manage their benefits. We’re acquiring customers where they already are, which changes the economics of the business entirely. 

How does the Walmart relationship actually work in practice? 

Walmart has 200 million monthly shoppers, a million and a half employees, and 90% of the US population lives within ten miles of one of their 4,700 locations. Any time money changes hands at Walmart (someone getting paid, someone making a purchase), that’s an opportunity for OnePay to acquire a customer. And because Walmart already has data on those customers, we can make onboarding incredibly seamless. We’re never going to ask you questions in the onboarding journey that we already know the answers to. In some cases, we can use that data to underwrite a customer and say yes, where without it we might have said no. 

Where does AI fit into OnePay’s strategy? 

We think about AI in four buckets. The first is workplace productivity: everyone in the company has access to AI tools, and it has genuinely accelerated how we build. Product managers are walking into meetings with workable prototypes they built in 30 or 45 minutes using Claude. Three years ago that process would have taken weeks. 

The second is servicing and fraud. We’ve been scaling AI in customer service for a couple of years now and we’re seeing higher containment rates, high customer satisfaction scores and lower cost. 

The third, which I’m most excited about, is financial decision-making. We’ve just launched a product called OnePay Money Companion (OPMC), a financial agent that uses the data we have on customers to give them genuinely personalized advice. As an example, if a customer has a 635 FICO score and wants to improve it to refinance their car or buy a home, we can map out how to get there based on their specific situation. 

The fourth area is more nascent but I think will be significant over time: agentic finance. Today all our customers are people. Over the next few years, agents acting on behalf of people will also become users of financial services platforms. We want to be ready for that. 

What does success look like in ten years? 

We’re four years old with 6 million active customers, and we believe we have a very long runway ahead. The goal is to continue acquiring customers at scale and to deepen the wallet share relationship across their entire financial life. The business compounds as customers add more products; banking leads to credit, credit leads to investing, and so on. We want to be the one place Americans go to manage their money.