Amazon already owns online commerce, and it’s a major player in mobile payments, as well. (Did you know Amazon has its own peer-to-peer payments service?)

But where Amazon may truly be revolutionizing banking is its web services. Applications running on Amazon web services are commonly referred to as being “on the cloud.” A number of companies serving the financial services community live on Amazon’s cloud: SAP, Dow Jones, NASDAQ, Thomson Reuters, Suncorp and the U.S. Treasury Department, to name just a few.

Even more interesting is that several banks are finding homes on Amazon’s cloud, particularly abroad. Members Equity Bank of Melbourne, Australia, and National Australia Bank are both based on Amazon’s cloud, as is Madrid-based Bankinter and the Italian bank Unicredit.

Financial services are moving rapidly to the cloud — host-card emulation, which may break the gridlock around mobile payments, is cloud-based, as are the offerings of half the companies that take the stage at Finovate. There are other cloud providers — IBM and Salesforce are two of Amazon’s competitors in the financial services cloud — but Amazon leads the way, and is looking to eventually host every fintech company, from startup to megabank. There are blue skies ahead.

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