With about 215 million credit cards stored in its data bases, Amazon is one of the leaders in the payments industry and now CEO Jeff Bezos wants to make an even stronger push in that direction.
While Amazon already has a number of businesses in place that flex its power in the field, a new report citing sources close to the matter have said that Bezos has identified payments as a major area of focus for the company and is putting the pressure on Amazon's payments head, Tom Taylor. "Jeff's told us it's something we need to be successful in, and should be successful in," said Taylor recently. "The pressure I feel from Jeff is, 'Go faster.'"
It isn't a new revelation for the company, it has been tapping its wealth of payment data to offer services to other retailers that would allow customers to use Amazon login data to pay for items on otherwise unaffiliated sites. Amazon in turn would take a small fee of the transactions. At one point, Amazon also had another similar product that outside online retailers could use to track analytics data on its customers using Amazon's database.
Last year the company combined both products into a unified service and has already begun implementing it with various third party retailers. At this point the list of companies using Amazon's Login and Pay service really isn't all that impressive and is likely what is causing Bezos to push his team for more results. Gogo inflight Internet service is arguably the most well known name of the bunch.
While it may seem to some that Amazon's competitors wouldn't want to divulge its purchase data among other things, Taylor said there is no need for concern here. According to Amazon, with Login and Pay Amazon does not see exact details on the products being purchased. However, the company does have a virtual shopping-cart product available that does.
As for other payments services the company is looking into, we previously reported on a physical point-of-sale payment system built-in to Kindle devices Amazon is yet to confirm or deny. The company is also looking into mobile wallet options, current solutions aren't quite good enough for Amazon, but it sounds like it is something they are looking into on an ongoing basis. Either way, it appears the company has some massively untapped potential growth in the payments industry, and it doesn't sound like Jeff Bezos is willing to wait much longer to fully capitalize on it.