Banks Vs Amazon: Hidden Strategies Banks Can Use to Win the Battle

The determination by Amazon to slide into the banking system as a funds-account service provider is giving the principal banks overnight headache due to the firm’s well-known reputation, and that aggravated the shivers running down their spines. However, an analyst working with Bain & Co., Maureen Burns, debated the possibility of banks conquering the superiority poised by Amazon, if only they concentrate on a single major aspect.

It would be recalled that Amazon has chewed big chunks of billions of dollars from not less than five big sectors in 2017, making very little public declarations in the process. The retail behemoth is also filled with endless money and its customer-base keeps increasing every day, why then should it find it difficult to explore other opportunities?

Notwithstanding the glaring impending intimidation, the whole issue is not that gross for the old financial institutions as people are insinuating, says Maureen Burns, an affiliated analyst with Bain & Co. She also partook in writing a new article which examined the diversification of Amazon into the banking sector. Burns pointed out that these banks still have certain deep-seated leverages over Amazon and that is if more concentration can be placed on serving their customers better.

Amazon ventured big time into about five prominent industries in 2017, including the Whole Foods market. Now banks are jittery over its next move.

Burns insists that banks can do it!

While answering questions from analysts, Burns said that banks will have to detect the core areas of their clients’ deficiencies and seek out the quality services of collaborators like an expert in the technology sector who can train the clients on knowledge.

According to a research done by Bain & Co., less than 50% of the participants in America firmly admitted that they are enjoying convenience through the help of their banks’ official apps. On the other hand, the young people in America selected Amazon’s banking app as what they are addicted to.

Burns pointed out the advantage that banks have over Amazon, and that is in the area of their enormous balance layer, and that has already provided the much-required liquidity to operate funds-account services. She further explained that Amazon still has a huge wall of regulatory licensing and approvals to scale through regardless of its intended financial services. Fortunately, these banks have the legal licenses at hand.

Once these two instruments are put in place, then banks shouldn’t be afraid of Amazon, the analyst said. The next thing to do would be to boost their external-facing customer-base communication. At the end of the day, Burns feels that the old banks just need to deeper concentrate on their inner operations, while the e-commerce giant will still be busy soliciting for a memorandum of understanding between itself and big financial firms.

Maureen Burns seems to have the right answers to the principal bank’s confusion.

Trust is everything

Another issue the professional analyst raised was trust and its influence on the minds of customers, corroborating the latest survey carried out by Bain, which dwelt so much on it. Bain discovered that in this case, trust is a component that can determine the way everything turns out for Amazon in its attempt to take the banking sector.

The results from Bain’s survey show that Amazon already has a solid foundation to hit the ground running. It has a top position on the trust chart and it surpasses the rankings of its counterparts in the technology industry by a wide gap. Customers have the unwavering trusts in Amazon and will likely entrust their financial assets to its hands than giants like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.

Eventually, the old banks will have a lot to do if they really wish to contest favorably with Amazon. They also need to battle the usual words of Amazon president, Jeff Bezos, which says that other opponents’ margins will translate to opportunities for him.

This will likely be an extremely hard nut to crack, mostly because these companies are very far behind the dynamism of Amazon, and it shows that they are somewhat incapacitated to cover the wide field.

Burns concluded that banks have to begin working towards the example Amazon has set. She noted that the e-commerce has slipped into many aspects like; fearlessness in terms of risk-taking, creativity, readiness to survey, readiness to suffer financial loss, and undertaking a very strong feasibility study to locate the most juicy places where revenues can be generated fast. In other words, the company is ready for a prolonged stay in the financial market, she added.