I worked on Amazon Payments systems for quite some time back in the day. We took pride in being the best payment processors. Had direct connections with card networks, banks and what not. We even launched a PayPal competitor[1]. They launched a Square like device for physical retailers[2]. They invested some serious money in building and maintaining all of that.<p>However going by this news seems like Amazon has more or less given up on their payments ambitions. Could be also due to recent layoffs. This is a big news. Maybe Amazon wants to focus on being good at few things instead of running hundreds of experiments.<p>Edit: References.<p>[1] <a href="https://pay.amazon.com" rel="nofollow">https://pay.amazon.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/10/30/amazon-kills-credit-card-reader-and-square-competitor-register/?sh=1fe756ae2ca8" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/10/30/amazon-kills...</a>
In enterprise, it’s often the case that your biggest customer effectively owns you. They get to dictate roadmaps, you’re forced to spin up a special team just for them, and it becomes harder to justify your investment into long tail customers because this big golden monkey is on your back.
I had a short period where I worked in Amazon payments. Max Bardon was the L10 or whatever above me.<p>Amazon likes to diversify their payment processors. They don't have one payment processor for one region because it's an availability issue for them. Cost of payments is big. So this is likely some agreement to help Amazon reduce their cost of payments, by essentially redirecting costs to the AWS side of things. India likely isn't being processed because India has regulations that most other countries do not. Adyen, Braintree, and maybe not even Stripe can be payment processors there (if they are, they're likely just a proxy for another processor).
I don't understand how Amazon needs or can use Stripe in the US (I can see how it would be useful for the emerging markets they were previously using). As the largest merchant in the country, don't they already have direct negotiations with banks and compete for the lowest possible fees?
Amazon has its own Uber, own fulfillment service down to monitoring tools that are built in house. So, not sure if it's a change in their "buy vs build" strategy or there's a more business play here to gain traction in the global markets?
Interesting how India is not in the list of countries where Amazon is relying on Stripe.<p>Amazon is doing its own fintech play here, with heavy investments into Amazon Pay, Amazon Credit cards, and more. None of that seems to be driven via Stripe, but other local partners and banks instead.
This seems like one of those “unlock greater efficiencies” type deals where both parties earn an effective 0% margin on each others’ business. Both payment processing and cloud computing are very low margin when you’re handling business for a savvy customer who knows how to reduce costs.<p>From a data perspective, it would seem that there would be some major implications for this particular deal. If Stripe can gain a window into the purchasing habits and volumes of Amazon’s massive customer base (not the actual items, but the size and frequency), it seems like it’d be a major boost to the depth and breadth of its machine learning models. For Amazon to give that sort of capability to another company — which seems to have begun a few years back — seems quite remarkable to me.<p>On this same line of thought, I would assume that Apple has been working to bring more and more of its payment infrastructure in-house, as it’s a major area of data leakage (regardless of whether the data is merely used to train fraud prevention models, or to do something more “interesting”). Maybe someone with actual knowledge on these matters will comment here…
I wish everyone would switch to Stripe, I hate to be forced to keep an account on PayPal in order to deal with some partners because PayPal can't just get a credit card and let me pay without trying to be a social network, when some partner send me stripe, it's so easy and straightforward without any fuss
Everyone is missing the main point of this partnership..<p>By merging data about every purchase, both Amazon and stripe benefit dramatically from lowered fraud rates.<p>Suddenly Amazon now knows when payments on your card are likely to bounce because you're at your credit limit, so they can pick the best time to send you promotional messages.<p>Stripe 'intelligence' can now have a much stronger good/bad signal for every card.<p>This deal is primarily a data deal, and both parties will benefit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Do these "partnerships" ever specify more binding conditions (exclusivity in some market, a minimum commitment of business over some period of time etc). Obviously the public announcements are a great opportunity to co-promote respective entities, but how much do these actually constrain business options?
Amazon must have seriously considered not only bypassing a company like Stripe but also competing with them.<p>I'm sure Amazon Pay or AWS Payments or whatever must have got some serious consideration. Not to mention every bank offering a direct relationship.
Why? Amazon is known for vertical integration. And AWS has so many big customers that losing Stripe shouldn’t move the needle. Is Amazon playing possum to acquire them, and Stripe is playing along?
> We couldn’t run without AWS [...] said David Singleton, chief technology officer of Stripe<p>I know this is a PR piece, but shouldn't a CTO know better? What could they possible not have achieved if they weren't using AWS? Literally every feature of AWS exists somewhere else. Maybe not all of the same features in the same place, but to say they couldn't run Stripe without AWS strikes me a bit silly.
So is Amazon Pay just arbitraging Stripe's standard 2.9%?<p><a href="https://pay.amazon.com/" rel="nofollow">https://pay.amazon.com/</a>
fast forward to future post title "I can't checkout anymore on Amazon because I'm banned on stripe from black box algorithms and I don't know why"