Amazon

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.

The payments industry is a hotbed of innovation, and many of its larger players are eager to claim patents on new developments.

By experimenting with palm-print hand wave transactions, Amazon is putting its resources behind another work-in-progress technology that traditional retailers will almost certainly have to invest in just to keep pace.

The local payments acceptance technology of cross-border fintech dLocal is now available for Amazon users in Chile.

Moynihan says the bank’s consumer market share could be doubled; retail terminals would connect customer’s hand print with their card information.

Last week, Indian regulators ordered an antitrust probe of Walmart and Amazon while Jeff Bezos and other Amazon execs traveled to New Delhi to tout a $1 billion investment to digitize local businesses. The message is U.S. investment is welcome, as long as U.S.-driven data mining is kept at bay.

The recent explosion of online shopping tools pointing users to the lowest prices for items — particularly on Amazon — appears to be making the e-commerce giant nervous.