Sources: Amazon is in talks with big banks including JPMorgan Chase about a checking-account-like product that would appeal to those without bank accounts
Online giant wants to develop product that would appeal to younger customers and those without bank accounts.
Context & Ripple Effects
In March 2018, Amazon was in talks with big banks including JPMorgan Chase about an Amazon-branded, checking-account-like product aimed at younger customers and the unbanked — a distribution play where the bank supplies the regulated balance sheet and Amazon supplies the customer base. The arc since then is instructive: the talks were ultimately scrapped in their early stages by late 2019, while JPMorgan separately shut down Finn, its own mobile-only bank for younger customers, after roughly a year.
The idea didn't die with Amazon's retreat — Google moved into the same territory shortly after, planning checking accounts offered through partner banks and credit unions, which suggests the platform-plus-bank structure itself remained attractive even when Amazon's version failed.
First-order effects
- For JPMorgan and any partner bank, the deal would have meant acquiring deposits and younger customers through Amazon's reach rather than branch networks — the same demographic JPMorgan was chasing with Finn at the time.
- For Amazon, a deposit-like product would deepen its financial relationship with shoppers and give it a payments rail beyond the merchant-side push it was making with Amazon Pay around the same period.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's abandonment cleared the lane for rivals: Google's subsequent checking-account partnership plan shows tech platforms treating banks as back-end utilities while keeping the brand-facing relationship.
- Banks' later consideration of Zelle as a Visa/Mastercard alternative signals incumbents responding to platform disintermediation by strengthening their own payment rails rather than only renting themselves out as partners.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer banking splits into regulated balance-sheet providers and customer-owning front ends — with the economics of deposits and payment flows accruing to whoever owns the interface, a shift regulators would eventually have to address.
- JPMorgan's parallel failure with Finn suggests the constraint wasn't the product category but channel ownership: banks struggled to reach young and unbanked customers directly even as platforms like Google kept trying through them.
The trend: Consumer banking distribution is migrating toward tech platforms that own the customer relationship, with banks recast as regulated back-end partners — a structure Amazon tested first and abandoned, and Google picked up next.