Amazon

Amazon.com Inc. suffered a technical glitch on Sunday affecting online grocery orders through its Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh delivery services, which have become lifelines for household essentials for people looking to avoid stores due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The addition of Maria Renz shows how much emphasis the San Francisco fintech is putting on operations and customer experience.

The Amazon effect in financial services will be much bigger than the one experienced by the retail industry—it will have a deeper impact due to the financial services industry being bigger and more vulnerable, and because consumers are now more comfortable with change, says TigerGraph's Todd Blaschka.

Amazon's dominance of the smart speaker segment makes it well positioned to turn an increasingly work-from-home culture into a voice-shopping powerhouse.

In announcing plans to export Just Walk Out to other retailers, Amazon rattled the emerging autonomous checkout industry and raised questions about its ability to amass even more data than it already has about consumer consumption patterns.

Banks, especially smaller ones, are more worried about the competitive inroads that Apple Pay, Venmo and others have made than they are about tech companies' incursions into other financial segments, according to a new survey by Promontory Interfinancial Network.

Consumer response to banking by smart speaker has been underwhelming. But a handful of financial institutions keep plugging away in hopes customers warm to the advantages of verbal commands instead of pushing buttons.

The $800 billion grocery industry is keeping a sharp eye on a strip mall in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. There, sandwiched between a nail salon and a bank branch, Amazon.com Inc. is working on the first in a new chain of grocery stores set to open this year.

Investors think the billions being shelled out to keep up with the likes of Amazon might be better spent elsewhere.

Payment industry players are expected to present testimony on Capitol Hill before a House financial technology task force on Thursday that’s weighing a bill to prohibit stores from refusing to accept cash.