Wall Street Journal has announced the active consideration of online eCommerce giant Amazon.com’s use of its patented voice assistant Alexa to try and enter the online payment market to compete with Paymo’s Venmo and other large banks which offer payment services. With the help of Alexa’s voice-based instruction inference system, the users can now transfer money.
In the United States, major banks play the upper hand via Visa and MasterCard-based payment systems in the P2P payment market. Wall Street Journal commented that Amazon is apparently looking for new opportunities to enter the P2P business and compete with existing giants in the field. Presently, the red-hot off the oven, Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa is the best weapon that they can wield in this regard.
Amazon is putting a lot of effort into adding support for Alexa to offer payment options, like voice payments for cars that are equipped with Alexa’s paid features. The company is currently negotiating with some of the largest banks in the United States for collaboration.
Even after the popularization of electronic payments in China and India, the United States is still lagging behind in this regard. So, it can be expected that the impact to be faced by Amazon won’t be too much. Although after entering the financial market, Amazon will be better equipped to collect customer data on shopping habits.
