Piggy Banker?

That's a change in plan from a few years ago, when the company said it wanted to enter full-service retail banking because that's what its customers want. A spokesman for the company in 2003, for example, said that because Wal-Mart could not find enough banks willing to open branches in its stores, it wanted to do it on its own.

At about the same time, Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr. said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that the company wanted to be gung-ho into financial services, including mortgages.

Since then, Wal-Mart has changed its approach, says Jane Thompson, president of Wal-Mart Financial Services. The company has "read the tea leaves," she said. The in-store banks will now be outside partners.

Thompson says the company already works with 300 banks that operate branches in its stores and has embarked on an aggressive campaign to recruit more. Wal-Mart has 1,980 supercenters, 1,150 of them with full-service bank branches. And Wal-Mart has contracts for an additional 250 branches in its stores, including some to be housed in some of the eight superstores it plans to open in the next 12 months in Virginia and Maryland.

Thompson, as proof of Wal-Mart's new direction, points out that its contracts with outside banks are long-term, lasting 15 years if a bank wants. And partnering with outside firms is something Wal-Mart is used to, she said. Wal-Mart credit cards are offered through GE Money Bank, and wire transfers around the world go through MoneyGram Payment Systems Inc.

"People are not looking at the facts," Thompson said of the vocal opposition. "We have no aspirations to have our own branch in our stores. We've said publicly that we have no intent to branch. We're heading the other way."

Critics remain skeptical that Wal-Mart's ultimate goal has changed.

"Why should we believe them?" asked Tracy Sefl, spokesman for Wal-Mart Watch, a coalition of organized labor, community groups, environmentalists and others critical of the retailer's business practices. "Nothing would prevent Wal-Mart, once it's granted a bank charter, from coming back to the FDIC and asking to do more with it."

Even some Wal-Mart supporters think the company's entry into banking would inevitably change the industry. "Typically, when Wal-Mart enters a new product category, all of a sudden, the world goes topsy turvy," says Britt Beemer, founder and chairman of Americas Research Group in Charleston, S.C, a consumer-research firm that interviews as many as 15,000 consumers a week for corporate clients. "It forces the marketplace to charge less for the categories it's into. It would be a good thing in banking because instead of banks talking about customer service, they would actually have to offer it."

Wal-Mart and its supporters say Target's approval will make it hard for the FDIC to turn down Wal-Mart. But some government officials caution that the FDIC's approval process isn't automatic.

The agency must weigh objective measures, such as Wal-Mart's financial soundness. But it also must consider the "general character and fitness" of management, which could provide room for disagreement. Critics who testify at the upcoming FDIC hearings almost certainly will bring up the sexual-discrimination case against the company brought by more than 1.5 million women and other labor problems, including its settlement last year on allegations it broke child-labor laws.

Wal-Mart officials say they look forward to FDIC and congressional hearings as a chance to set the record straight. In the meantime, the company continues to open superstores at a rate of about 22 a month nationwide and searches for banks that will open branches in them.

And customers do love having a bank in the stores. "It works for me," said Darlene Thornhill, shopping at the Wal-Mart supercenter Friday in Culpeper, Va. Like dozens of other folks in the store, she strolled up with her as-yet-empty shopping cart to one of two tellers manning the store's SunTrust branch. The branch was sandwiched between Wal-Mart's customer-service center, where customers could buy money orders for 46 cents or transfer money to Mexico for $8.55, and the Da-Vi Nail Salon on the other.

She said the branch is open longer than the other one on the other side of town. Does she buy more at Wal-Mart because she can -- and now exclusively does -- bank there? "It probably helps," she said. "I usually think, 'Oh well, while I'm here I might as well pick up such-and-such.' "