Amazon introduced Prime Reload Tuesday, which rewards 2 percent of purchases back to Prime members who fund their Amazon balances with their debit cards.
Forget the rumors about Amazon potentially buying a bank. Amazon practically is a bank. To date it has a foot in payments, cash, small business lending, consumer credit and now it’s coming for debit card users.
It’s not necessarily positioning itself to replace the existing banks, said Brendan Miller, principal analyst at Forrester Research; it’s just another way for people to interact with their money at a time when consumers funds are becoming more and more dispersed. Too bad for banks, that means they’ll naturally be taking fewer and fewer deposits and eventually, engage less and less with their customers, who will be engaging more with service providers like Amazon.
“There was already a trend of bank card spend being consolidated inside apps and services, and we are seeing the downstream risk to banks who are aware of this trend but aren’t do anything to act on it,” said Cherian Abraham, senior business consultant at Experian.
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