No one knows if Amazon will be buying a bank anytime soon, but more and more, it’s becoming a shining example of how banks themselves should be running their businesses.
Banks have embraced the idea that their own customers want new products delivered by new financial startups — the savings and management apps, authentication and security tools and money movement capabilities — but to truly put the customer experience first (as so many say they do) they should show the customers they’re here to give them what they want. That means instead of collaborating with young startups on building technology, they should make themselves a distribution channel with different financial products — just like Amazon does.
“Amazon opens its platform to hundreds if not thousands of providers of goods and services and makes it available to millions of consumers — they don’t care what you buy or from who as long as you buy it from the Amazon platform,” said Ron Shevlin, director of research at Cornerstone Advisors. “Amazon does have products to sell,” like the Fire TV or the Kindle. “They don’t care if you buy them because they still sell the iPad and everything else.”
It’s probably a little out there for banks. But more and more, changing customer expectations and an increasingly digital world are forcing banks to accept the idea of open banking platforms. But they should also bring that thinking to their actual business model.
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