(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] Big Tech has its eyes set on your wallet.
Apple has a credit card.
Facebook is trying to introduce its own currency.
And Google has plans to offer checking accounts
to users of its digital wallet in 2020.
You can do a lot with a wallet in your phone,
like boarding a train or.
(electronic ding)
So tech firms are offering services
that are usually associated with banks,
but they're doing it differently.
- It's really about data.
When a company like Apple or Google
processes a payment for you, they find out
a lot about you.
They know what you bought, where you bought it,
what time of the day or what day of the month
you're likely to spend money,
and that's really valuable information for advertisers.
- [Narrator] Also, banking is another way
for tech firms to draw customers
further into their universes.
- So Facebook started out as a way
to talk to your friends, and then became a place
you shared baby photos with your grandparents.
And now you can shop on Facebook properties,
you can message, Instagram, WhatsApp.
Amazon is the same way.
It started out as a big store,
and now they make home speakers,
they make original movies and television shows.
So these companies all started off with one thing
and they're adding more things around it
and finance is kind of the last frontier.
- [Narrator] As more people change their banking habits,
tech companies say they can bring something to the table.
Google says it will build helpful tools
while relying on partnerships
to navigate the financial world.
For its part, Apple promises to eliminate fees
for its credit card, and give you cashback instantly.
And the Apple Pay app will have charts
that help users track their buying habits.
Meanwhile, the Facebook-backed Libra Association
says that using a blockchain to process transactions
could make cross-border payments cheaper and faster.
The company says its planned cryptocurrency, Libra,
could provide banking services for billions of people.
That plan has faced headwinds.
Several early partners dropped from the project
and US Fed chairman Jerome Powell raised concerns
with the plan, saying that Facebook's size
could make Libra immediately, systemically important.
That size is on display in the other services too.
According to projects from Juniper Research,
Google Pay is on track to have 100 million users
worldwide in 2020.
By that time, Apple Pay could have 227 million users.
Both would be huge increases from 2018.
- These tech companies are already really big
and some regulators think too big.
Several US regulatory bodies
already have antitrust investigations into Google,
Apple, Facebook and other big companies.
- [Narrator] Their push into banking
could sharpen those concerns.
And public trust is an issue too.
A poll from McKinsey and Company suggests
that a slight majority of respondents
would trust Google and Apple to handle their finances,
but Facebook fared less well.
- Some people are already wary
of giving tech companies access to their location
and their photos.
Financial data is just way more personal.
- [Narrator] More concerns over privacy and power
will be on display as tech firms get into finance.
The data are valuable, and increasingly
they're in the hands of a few tech companies.
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