Dive Brief:

• Marqeta Chief Financial Officer Mike Milotich touted the company’s new earned wage access offering at a conference last week, providing some details on that strategy.
• EWA accounted for $2 billion, or about 3% of Marqeta’s total payments volume last year, a figure the company had reported in its 2023 fourth quarter earnings call, Milotich said. In addition to existing clients Walmart and Uber, the company is angling to sign up retail companies and staffing agencies that employ hourly workers to its EWA product.
• Milotich confirmed that EWA was Walmart’s default payroll option for its employees, adding that sign-ups at both Walmart and Uber were “quite, quite strong.” 

Dive Insight:

Ride-sharing platform Uber and mega-retailer Walmart were among Oakland, California-based Marqeta’s first clients to offer the debit-card-linked EWA product product to their workers.

“With so many workers in the US living paycheck to paycheck, we're proud that Marqeta's innovation in embedded finance can make a positive impact on their financial lives. This solution is also a win for employers, offering them an important tool to retain their contingent workers while also using their working capital more efficiently,” Marqeta Chief Revenue Officer Todd Pollak said in an emailed statement.

But the question of whether EWA offerings qualify as loans is being decided differently in different states. Missouri and Nevada both passed laws last year leap-frogging their state lending laws to require a separate registration process for EWA providers, while Connecticut has allowed a carve-out for one company.

California has issued a proposal to generally treat EWA advances like loans, an approach backed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

Whatever the regulatory challenges, analysts at the financial firm William Blair cited EWA as a potential benefit to Marqeta’s business. “Management believes that growth of (EWA) will be supported by a host of secular trends, including growth of the global gig market economy, which is anticipated to grow at a 14% compound annual rate between 2022 and 2028,” the firm said in a February analyst note.

A spokesperson for Marqeta did not immediately respond to questions about the timing of the launch of the EWA services or the performance of the EWA product.