Amazon
The bottom line: Much like Apple, Amazon is focusing on growth through partnerships to cut costs and ease the regulatory hassle of building products from the ground up. It’s been more cautious than other Big Tech firms in launching financial services products, but its brand is hugely popular and its platform is already associated with ecommerce. If Amazon can successfully embed financial products that improve the user experience into its platform, the convenience will help it attract customers.
Google
- Google has used the success of Google Pay to expand into financial services through tie-ins with banks via cloud contracts and advertising partnerships.
- It was forced to abandon plans to offer bank accounts through its mobile wallet.
- But it hasn’t given up on continuing growth in financial services: It expanded into crypto payments and is embedding payments in increasingly creative ways, such as through Google Maps.
The bottom line: Google has a huge, engaged audience from which it could generate more revenues with banking, payments, and insurance features. Expect it to keep pushing into banking by bolting on new products to existing services through routes like embedded finance.
Twitter
- Since completing his megadeal for the social media giant, Elon Musk has responded to intense pressure to grow revenues and cut losses by announcing mass layoffs and plans for paid verification
- He’s outlined his ambitions to integrate payments into Twitter. His previous praise for PayPal may indicate that he will use the company as a template for offering payment products.
- And in a signal of intent last week, Twitter reportedly filed paperwork with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)—a requirement for companies to conduct money transfers, exchange currency, and cash checks.
- Last week, Musk said he hoped to turn Twitter into the “people’s financial institution,” and spoke about building high-yield money market accounts, per a recording obtained by the Verge.
The bottom line: Musk wants to turn Twitter into X, a super app modeled on China’s WeChat that would offer money market accounts, payments, and shopping. But the project will face intense regulatory scrutiny and the company first has to deal with adverse publicity and defecting users.