Another step towards an AmazonBay future?
Or just (another) online marketing deal?
As many of you will have already read, this weekend Fidelity Investments has inked an agreement with Amazon to sponsor a new financial services store on Amazon.com.
Press reports indicate that Amazon customers will be able to access a Fidelity-sponsored web page from links on Amazon’s home page. This would at first glance seem to be rather less exciting than the idea of actually selling mutual funds and other investment products via Amazon’s e-commerce platform and indeed some early commentators are referring to the deal as “just” an (elaborate) marketing agreement rather than anything more innovative or ground-breaking.
Obviously I have no idea what exactly Fidelity and Amazon have in mind either in the short or the long term, but even if it is only a marketing alliance in the first instance, I think it is a very interesting deal as the potential clearly exists for this relationship to develop and evolve over time into something more substantive. As to Amazon’s motives they are fairly obvious as stated by the company itself:
”It’s our goal to provide our customers with the ability to find, discover, and buy anything they want on the Internet, and that includes financial services,” said Craig Berman, a spokesman for Amazon.com in Seattle. ”Customers have been buying books about personal finance, retirement, colleges, and so forth. So this is a natural extension.”
Is this an early substantive step towards an AmazonBay future in financial services? I think so.
By starting out this way, it would seem that Amazon and Fidelity avoid having to resolve/engineer all the compliance and regulatory issues that would arise from a deeper integration and move up the learning curver considerably before deciding how and when to move forward in that direction.
Finally, this is another potential example of retail/consumer (as opposed to wholesale/industrial) markets driving innovation and change. This will be one of the fundamental differences between 20th century and 21th century economies and markets.
Update:
Not sure about the blog implementation (ok I know only one post, so I’m cautious about jumping to conclusions in haste)… potentially a good idea, but first post looks slightly too close to Captain Morgan for comfort.)
