When Amazon first launched, the company disrupted the retailer market by being one of the first few companies to offer online shopping. More recently, the company also looked to disrupt the supermarket industry with its Amazon Go stores, where there are no cashiers, only sensors that can detect what you’ve taken and charges it to your Amazon account.Now it looks like Amazon might want to take on the payments industry, or at least that’s according to a report from the New York Post who claims that the company is looking to test a hand-scanning system that will eliminate the need to hand over cash or credit cards. This scanning system doesn’t even require users to touch anything, where through the use of vision and depth geometry, it will apparently be able to identify the hands on the person and charges their purchases to their credit cards that are already linked to Amazon.
So far the system is said to be accurate within one ten-thousandth of 1%, but apparently Amazon engineers are hoping to get it to an accuracy within a millionth of 1%. Amazon has declined to comment on the report, only stating that they do not comment on rumors or speculation.
It is unclear why Amazon is interested in such a system, but peaking to the New York Post, Majd Maksad, the CEO of personal finance website Status Money, “People tend to spend more when they don’t have the experience of touching something tangible like money. The utility of money becomes more ephemeral.”