Breaking news today shows Amazon working aggressively to consolidate its power in one of the world’s biggest emerging markets.
PYMNTS.com reports Amazon is adding services for selling gold and auto insurance to Indian customers through its Amazon Pay system that’s getting a lot of traction in that country.
This effort appears to be linked to getting more Indian members to sign on for the Amazon Prime service that the company has relied on boost its bottom line internationally.
A press statement making the rounds in these stories involves Mahendra Nerurkar, head of Amazon Pay in India, contending that Amazon might be able to move Indians toward digital payment options, and away from their physical wallets.
“Apparently Chinese fashion designers are leaving the back pockets off jeans because no one uses them anymore (for wallets),” Nerurkar told Reuters. “We would love to make that happen in India.”
While it might help with certain kinds of back problems, doing away with a physical wallet completely involves more than just digital payments. Where will people carry their identification cards, pictures of loved ones, business cards, and other portable paperwork?
However, Amazon’s work does dovetail with some surprising sudden moves by the Indian government.
In 2016, India’s ruling party made larger 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes obsolete, in a move decried by activists as having a negative impact on the poor and relatively un-banked.
In the change, which is called “demonetization,” the ostensible reason for this move was to limit counterfeiting and other types of fraud.
It appears that Amazon saw this behavior, and struck while the iron was hot, further pushing the idea of a cashless society toward fruition.
The subject of whether to keep maintaining fiat cash systems is likely to be a big one in many societies over the next few years. It’s also up to the individual investor to consider alternatives to cash, whether they be precious metals or cryptocurrencies or anything else – and do the research required to make informed portfolio decisions.
