Amazon wins, once again, at a game it didn’t even know it was playing.
According to a Jan. 11 survey from Accenture, millennial participants would consider parking their money with nontraditional institutions, and they picked winners.
Attractive alt-banking contestants included Apple and Facebook, but it was Google, and of course, Amazon, that emerged with the laurels.
Versions of this survey — and surveys saying the opposite, that millennials do trust banks — have been making the rounds in the industry for some time.
According to Accenture, 40% of global millennial respondents reported that they would consider switching over to those two online titans. Millennials in the U.S were slightly more enthusiastic, with 50% saying they would consider these hypothetical alternative providers of banking services.
The willingness of younger consumers to consider banking alternatives outside of the traditional is one of five consumer trends outlined by Accenture. Others include an increased penchant for automated financial servicing, looking at data as more of a currency, tailoring financial advice to the individual recipient, and of course, omnichannel capabilities.
Accenture marked “data as currency” as the No. 1 trend, with 67% of survey respondents stating that they would be willing to share more data with banks—or perhaps Amazon, in the future—in turn for new or enhanced benefits at the bank. (Customers do already share massive amounts of data with Amazon, Google, and Facebook, but their understanding of the value of that data seems to be advancing. This makes the exchange of data into, well, an exchange, a shift in consumer thought that began to gain ground in 2016, according to Accenture.
From the report:
Consumers are willing to share their personal data with financial providers, but they want something in return. Today’s consumers understand the value of their data, and they expect those providers to whom they entrust it to deliver added benefits, such as a priority service, pricing benefits, or more personalized product, service or non-regulated financial advice.
Taking a look at a few of those added benefits, one might be able to see why millennial respondents in particular would jump to park their money in the Amazon Vault (probably not the name of the banking service Amazon has yet to create.)
Amazon Prime customers currently enjoy “priority service” from the sprawling online retailer. For Prime and non-Prime customers, “pricing benefits” has been a staple of Amazon’s brand. Coming up with a way to personalize products shouldn’t be too difficult for a company that presently offers over 300,000,000 products on its online marketplace.
That’s not to say Amazon has already won this battle, of course—millennials also reported a willingness to bank with Google, which does already offer a mobile wallet product. It’s the showdown that was meant to be.
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