J.P. Morgan has reportedly been working on an “e-wallet” to help companies handle payments better and become more like banks.
J.P. Morgan’s strategy is that helping companies like Airbnb, Lyft, and Amazon.com give customers virtual bank accounts and “offer perks such as car loans or discounts on home rentals to those who keep money stashed there” to foster customer loyalty. In return, these companies have to pay less in payment processing fees, and J.P. Morgan gets guaranteed payment processing and money handling for these companies. The wholesale payments business has significant effect on J.P. Morgan since it contributed 10% to J.P. Morgan’s $109 billion in revenue last year.
An Accenture report showed that “banks over the next five years risk losing 15% of their revenue — around $280 billion — due to escalating competition from non-banks such as Adyen and massive tech companies from PayPal to Apple”. Takis Georgakopoulos, who runs wholesale payments for JPMorgan, reiterated how he is afraid that more companies will begin venturing into the payments space:
“There’s no doubt in my mind that e-commerce platforms are thinking about how to do what you would call traditional retail banking or insurance products more than they did in the past.”
The mad scramble to disrupt the payments industry
Georgakopoulos further added about potential customers that they are “talking to all of them” and “want the whole industry to use it” since they “want to keep as much money movement as possible under our control for each individual client”. J.P. Morgan’s recognizes that they need to develop a solution that can simplify payments that these companies and their customers typically have to deal with since they are already looking for alternatives. Uber has started working with Green Dot Corp. to roll out e-wallets that let drivers and riders track earnings, manage and move their money. PayPal bought Hyperwallet, a payment provider, last year “to boost its ability to handle cross-border payments for e-commerce platforms and marketplaces”. Then Apple recently announced a partnership with Goldman Sachs for its own credit card, which they plan to leverage to enable consumers to buy iPhones on credit.
Some are even speculating that this new e-wallet by J.P. Morgan could be a testing ground for their JPM Coin that was announced earlier this year. This could represent an ideal fit since J.P. Morgan wants to simplify and reduce the cost of banking by keeping everything internal and within their ecosystem to ensure the optimization of customer retention and profits.
Dash provides serious competition to payments industry players
As more companies and platforms such as J.P. Morgan jump into the race to disrupt the payments system, Dash maintains a singular focus on this use case among decentralized cryptocurrencies. Dash already offers transactions that settle in under an average of 2 seconds and for less than $0.0005 USD, which offers its users a vast improvement over traditional bank services. Additionally, since Dash is decentralized and open-source, it can freely be exchanged and moved between any and all platforms that have chosen to integrate support for the coin.
Dash has been focusing on obtaining listings on as many exchanges as possible and getting those exchanges to support InstantSend so Dash can have easy on and off ramps for consumers. Dash then relies on its competitive advantages such extremely fast and low cost transactions with automatic InstantSend, ChainLocks for extra security, PrivateSend, its surrounding infrastructure, and robust and engaged community to encourage consumers to adopt Dash over other payment methods.
