Amazon’s Payments AdventuresFrom payments to lending to insurance to checking accounts – Amazon has been attempting a multi-pronged onslaught in financial services. The internet company has been supremely focused on building financial services that supports its core business objective of increasing participation in the Amazon ecosystem, and payments is an extremely important piece of this ecosystem participation puzzle. Digital and closed-loop payments solutions help Amazon to offer frictionless transactions to consumers and reduce cost of transactions that it pays to payment processing firms. Most importantly it helps Amazon unlock the value of financial data to aid its personalization objective. This quest to own a bigger piece of the Payments value chain has resulted in several run-ins with the incumbents and partnerships with the fintech disruptors. We look at Amazon’s Payment adventures during the last 30 months. The e-commerce giant and payment solutions provider Visa are back in the limelight this year, as in a recent turn of events, Amazon has decided to temporarily halt the ban on Visa credit cards in the UK – a decision taken by the online retailer in November 2021. We take a look at some of the key events that shaped the retail platform’s payments […]