Amazon is the tech giant most likely to become a dominant player in fintech, predicted James Lloyd, Ernst & Young’s fintech lead, when speaking on stage at TechCrunch and TechNode’s event in Shenzhen, China on Monday.
Lloyd told TechCrunch that he expects Amazon to expand further into payments, lending and credit scoring. “They’ll get into everything that facilitates their ecosystem,” he said. Lloyd sees parallels between Amazon and Ant Financial (formerly Alipay), an affiliate of Alibaba.
Amazon recently announced that it has lent out $1 billion in small loans in the past year. Lloyd anticipates that it’ll double down on this space. “They have a huge amount of data that they could leverage to figure out how much you might need for the next three months for inventory.”
But he’s wondering why Amazon has delayed its entry into Southeast Asia. “A big question even for their core e-commerce business is what is Amazon going to do in Asia,” he said.
Also on stage was Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Airwallex, a transfer payments company for businesses that includes Tencent and MasterCard among its investors. Zhang talked about why he doesn’t believe bitcoin will be a long-term player in international transactions.
He doesn’t think there’s enough liquidity in the bitcoin market and he also voiced concern about volatility. “I don’t think that’s the future of cross-border payment,” he said.
