Amazon, the great disruptor, might be about to turn payments upside down too

Amazon’s ban on UK Visa credit cards is more than just a local post-Brexit spat, says John Stepek. It could be part of a wider plan to disrupt the whole payment industry.

Amazon logo and visa credit card
Amazon is to ban its customers from paying with Visa credit cards in the UK
(Image credit: © Leon Neal/Getty Images)

If you live in the UK and your shopping habits are anything like mine, you might have received an interesting email from Amazon earlier this week.

From 19 January next year, Amazon won’t be accepting Visa credit cards (debit cards are still OK). To compensate users, they’re offering £20 (Prime subscribers) or £10 (not Prime subscribers) to set your default payment method as being a debit or non-Visa credit card.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.