Coles breaks GE payments shackles

Wesfarmers will go it alone in the Australian credit market under its Coles brand, after opting to buy out GE Capital's 50 per cent share in a longstanding joint venture.

The Coles credit card portfolio has around A$850 million in receivables, Wesfarmers said yesterday.

Taking into account insurance customers, Coles now has 800,000 customers across its financial services portfolio.
It is only a year or so since GE secured an extension from Coles on the 21 year old joint venture.

Pooling capital with Bank of America at the time of foreign bank entry in the mid 1980s was the first real play in this niche by Coles.
 
In the 1990s it invested in acquiring its own payments and switching - an act of leadership it took Woolworths 20 years to follow.
 
But no real follow-on around banking products ever emerged at Coles, as it tinkered with financial services plans (in cahoots with GE) and rolled out precious little.

A 2014 update of this strategy called for a mobile wallet. Coles may yet emerge with a sophisticated "digital banking" offering.