Voice Payments are going Mainstream within next 5 years, and Amazon is leading the race

Voice payments is the next BIG thing. Doubt it? Follow the link, read my article and share your thoughts if you think otherwise.

In the meantime, I would like to draw your attention once again to one very important graph. Please see it below.

As it is visible from the provided data, today only slightly more than 18 million consumers in US have made a voice payment. However, this figure is expected to quadruple over the next five years, and thus reach nearly 80 million consumers.

By 2022, a third of population in US should be familiar with voice payments.

I would like to stress that here we are speaking about US only. Nevertheless, such countries as China, Brazil, Mexico, and some developing economies are rapidly catching up with the technology adoption (in fact, in some instances they have even leapfrogged the leaders), which in turn should drive the estimates (and the real numbers) forward. Hence, the potential is huge.

The Everything Store

Overseeing possible gains and the potential in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Voice Assistants (VA), Amazon has been working on it for quite a while (a reminder: Amazon Alexa has been launched in 2014). Thus, it is not surprising at all that the e-commerce giant is an obvious leader in this space.

In the beginning of this month Amazon’s Alexa voice platform has passed 15.000 skills – the voice-powered apps that run on such devices like the Echo speaker, Echo Dot, newer Echo Show and others. As we can see from the figure above, it is way ahead of its competitors – namely Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana.

Amazon is expected to control circa 70 per cent of voice-powered devices market in 2017.

According to some estimates, Amazon is expected to control about 70% of voice-powered devices market this year. This is huge, and the true race has not even started yet.

Voice Payments & Amazon

We must stress that the payments function at the moment is very limited in Alexa (as well as in every other VA). Though, you can still check your account balance, or make a credit card payment (at least with Capital One). Also, you can participate in the Stock Exchange (there were jokes that Jeff Bezos bought Whole Foods using this skill…).

Convenience, simplicity and hands-free experience are too important to be ignored.

Anyway, despite current limitations, I am quite confident that technological advancements and Amazon’s appetite will bring voice payments to mainstream adoption within the next 5 years. Convenience, simplicity and hands-free experience are simply too important to be ignored.

Bringing it all together

The upcoming next 5 years is going to be a very interesting period. Watch out for voice payments to be adopted as a convenient way of paying, with Amazon at the center of the industry.

Finally, as outlined earlier, I would like to stress that this is another good example illustrating how technology companies are disrupting yet another industry. I have briefly covered GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), and their approach to banking in my last 3 pieces. Follow the links for Part I, Part II, and Part III.