Amazon, the massive online retailer, has partnered with the global payments processing company WorldPay to add Amazon Pay to WorldPay’s massive list of merchants, according to a press release by PYMNTS on March 20, 2019.
This collaboration makes WorldPay the first acquirer to fully integrate Amazon Pay for its merchants, making it a milestone event for the payments industry.
Amazon Pay Establishing Themselves as a Leader in the Payments Industry?
Not only is Amazon Pay a popular payment method on the leading e-commerce platform, but it is also widely used outside of the Amazon website in brick and mortar retailers, as well as other online merchants around the world.
However, according to Amazon Pay Vice President Patrick Gauthier, their WorldPay partnership is a serious step towards Amazon Pay’s vision to become much more widely available to merchants. The company has a desire to become a world leader in not only online retail, but in payments as well.
Speaking about Amazon Pay’s strategy to make this goal a reality, Gauthier said:
“We started to really think about how [we] not only simplify integration and onboarding, but [how to] better manage operations on an ongoing basis. We decided the best solution for us was to integrate with a large merchant acquirer, as that simplifies a lot of the day-to-day issues around settlement, reconciliation, reporting and dispute management.”
Adding to this, Gauthier proclaimed that Amazon Pay will improve merchants’ interactions with buyers, stating that this partnership with WorldPay will become the starting point for further innovations in the payment industry.
Is Amazon Getting Closer to Ripple?
Amazon Pay’s newfound partnership with WorldPay has got Ripple fans and the XRP Army excited in anticipation that Amazon is getting closer to implementing Ripple (XRP). This is because WorldPay was recently bought out by the US fintech company, Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS), who are also a partner of Ripple.
Therefore, since FIS was already partnered with Ripple before acquiring WorldPay, now that WorldPay is partnering with Amazon Pay, it logically seems to be an indirect step of Amazon towards Ripple.
Adding to this theory, Amazon Pay’s Gauthier did say this recent partnership is only the starting point for further innovations in the payments industry.
What’s more, Amazon has been collaborating with Axis, an Indian bank that is a participant of Ripple’s network. According to Coinspeaker, Amazon and Axis are working together to ensure the functionality of a new payment app for the purchasing of products on Amazon, and XRP was applied in this very case.
Therefore, while there are no direct implications that Amazon plans to collaborate with Ripple, there are a lot of things that point to a potential collaboration in the near future.
Do you think Amazon and Ripple will collaborate and implement XRP payments in the future? Are XRP fans just being hopeful, or do the points made in this article hold any merit? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
