Amazon will be shutting down its free Webpay peer-to-peer payments system from mid-October, having made a low impact in the competitive online payments market.
Amazon has offered the free service to Amazon Payments users for the last four years, and the offering was largely viewed as an attempt to challenge PayPal’s hold on the online financial services market. But with Google and Square also offering similar P2P services, the e-commerce giant has decided to abandon Webpay.
Even its passing has not caused much of a stir, perhaps illustrating the limited impact the service had.
Webpay allows users to send digital cash to anyone by email, using only a credit card or their Amazon account. Because it can be characterized as a payment by the sender and as cash by the recipient, transactions are cost free. Webpay users will still be able to make payments until the service is pulled on October 13th, and recipients have 30 days to claim funds before money is returned to the sender. Even after that date, users will still be able to see a history of their transactions.
“We are not addressing a customer pain point particularly better than anyone else,” Amazon admitted on its website. “We’ve learned a great deal about how and when customers want to send money and will look for ways to use these lessons in the future.”
Whitepapers
Related reading
Central banks best suited to issue digital currencies
By Aaran Fronda A recent report by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) said that central banks rather than private ... read more
Instant payments: innovations inbound for corporates
In 2020, instant payments look set to continue their current trajectory to become the biggest trend in payments. While these schemes already offer numerous benefits to corporates, leveraging innovations such as APIs and request to pay will go some way to unlocking their full potential, argues Michael Knetsch
Obstacles exist for banks to meet ECB’s instant payments goal
The cost of joining instant payment platforms will be one of many hurdles banks and payment services providers must overcome to meet ... read more
Banks must be aware of “biases” in data used to train ML models
Financial institutions need to be conscious of biases in the historical data that is being used to train machine learning (ML) models, ... read more
