Financial services industry, look out. The boys of Bentonville are moving in, partnering with ShareBuilder, to offer low-cost investment services to customers. If you're not familiar with ShareBuilder, it's become a pretty big player in the discount brokerage industry by targeting a market most companies don't: people who might only have a few hundred dollars to invest. They offer a program that is ideal for dollar-cost averaging with small amounts of money. By combining thousands of orders for numerous stocks into a few big orders every Tuesday, the company is able to offer investors an opportunity to invest a little each week (or month) without facing prohibitively high transaction costs.

I haven't been able to get a lot of details on the plan, except that the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) service will offer customers a small discount from ShareBuilder's usual costs, depending on the number of trades per month. Wal-Mart describes the ShareBuilder partnership as a pilot project.

I like this a lot -- perhaps by advertising the program in-store, curious shoppers will take the company up on the offer to put a few dollars into shares of companies they're familiar with. By bringing the stock market into Wal-Mart, I believe we could see a lot of first-time investors starting to save for their future, and I think that's the goal here -- I doubt Wal-Mart thinks it can siphon off business from Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS).

I went into my local Wal-Mart the other day and couldn't find anything on this. Has anyone checked it out? Any thoughts on it?