Skip to main content

Amazon wants to make it easier to shop its website without a credit card

Amazon is in early talks with financial institutions including J.P. Morgan Chase to help launch checking account-like products, aimed at younger customers and those without bank accounts, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

This is the latest move by the e-commerce giant to solve one of the biggest barriers to shopping on its website: lack of a credit card.

More than a quarter of U.S. households have no or limited access to checking and savings accounts. These so-called unbanked and underbanked households rely heavily cash or checks to fund their purchases, making shopping online difficult. Unbanked doesn't necessarily mean unconnected, about 6 in 10 unbanked consumers have a smartphone, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

For Amazon, this group of shoppers is increasingly vital. New prime subscriptions flattened in the third quarter of 2017, according to analysts at Morgan Stanley. Another survey by Piper Jaffray in June said that 82 percent of U.S. households with more than $112,000 in annual income are already Prime members. Its reach is the lowest among those that make less than $41,000 a year.


Source :- abcnews

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

We're open to work with Britain over incident involving ex-agent

The Kremlin said on Tuesday it was ready to cooperate if Britain asks it for help investigating an incident involving a former Russian double agent who fell ill after exposure to an unknown substance. Sergei Skripal, once a colonel in Russia's GRU military intelligence service, was critically ill in hospital on Tuesday after he was exposed to an unidentified substance in southern England. "Nobody has approached us with such a request," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters, when asked if the British authorities had been in touch seeking help. "Moscow is always open for cooperation." When asked to respond to British media speculation that Russia had poisoned Skripal, Peskov said: "It didn't take them long." Calling the incident "a tragic situation," he said the Kremlin did not have information about what had happened. Source :- yahoonews

Key players recall 1968 Polish student revolt, ensuing anti-Semitism

In March 1968, a student revolt crushed by Poland's baton-wielding police was used as a pretext for an anti-Semitic purge by the communist regime. It began when the communists banned the 19th-century play "Forefathers' Eve" by poet Adam Mickiewicz claiming it had anti-Russian elements. Two students who contested the ban were expelled from the University of Warsaw, prompting their peers to stage a demonstration on March 8. Backed by other civil groups, particularly workers unhappy with daily life under communism, the pro-democracy protests spread to other cities. The regime used the student revolt as an excuse to unleash an anti-Semitic campaign that was rooted in a settling of scores inside the Communist Party, which was split into two camps. Source :- yahoonews

Tension with Israel 50 years after Poland's anti-Semitic campaign

On the 50th anniversary of a brutal anti-Semitic campaign in Poland, the country faces a diplomatic crisis with Israel over a controversial new Holocaust law. In 1968, partly to settle disputes inside the ruling Communist Party, the Polish government stripped many Jews of party membership -- and thus jobs -- prompting around 12,000 to leave the country. Today, Poland's conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) has been accused of trying to deny the Holocaust after introducing a law notably intended to prevent people from describing Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland as Polish. "It's not the same today," said Adam Michnik, a prominent communist-era dissident who is now editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading liberal newspaper. "There are certainly similarities. Once again there's a growing image of a Poland besieged by enemies and the enemies are the Jews who want to do us harm," he told AFP. Source :- yahoonews