Page 32 - July 2018 Disruption Report

AMAZON EATS EVERYTHING JANJULAYRY20210818
“We’re a new age insurance company and [Amazon] believes it can create value.”
What is Amazon rumored to do next?
Rumors abound as to where Amazon will go next in their expanding presence in financial services including:
• Amazon is reportedly getting into mortgage lending, according to HousingWire (March 2018). Although the retailer has not made concrete plans, Amazon has made hired a head of its newly-formed mortgage lending division, along with other strategic mortgage lending hires.
• Amazon is working with Ripple to obtain help with cross-border payments, according to CyptoDaily (May 2018).
• Amazon is reportedly in discussions to offer home insurance, according to The Information (June 2018). According to a source, Amazon is interested in selling home insurance with its connected home services devices.
• Bank of Amazon? To date, Amazon has focused on supporting increased participation of buyers and sellers on its e-commerce platform—typically seeding, investing and nurturing product lines with a long-time horizon.
CB Insights wrote:
...[O]ne can see the beginnings of what the Bank of Amazon could look like — a variety of key financial services products that support Amazon participants first and enable them to buy, sell, and transact much easier than any other platform. And that potential Bank of Amazon should worry the traditional incumbents. If history provides a useful lesson, it’s that Amazon first builds core product pillars for itself, where it is the only and most important customer. This was the case with AWS, which was the result of overhauling its own internal capacity for cloud services that were later repurposed for external clients and third-parties. Only after years of building a product and iterating on features for itself does Amazon launch and expose a key product pillar to other customers. By then, it will likely be too late for incumbents who have not responded. (ThinkGrowth. org, Matt Ward, 01/29/18; Everything You Need to Know About What Amazon Is Doing in Financial Services, CB Insignts, July 2018)
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