One of the most innovative and fastest-growing parts of the economy is fintech. We see it in public markets as companies like Square (SQ  ) and Paypal (PYPL  ) are two of the best-performing stocks this year. We also see it in private markets, where companies like Stripe and Robinhood are two of the most well-known "unicorns".

Companies are also investing and innovating in this space such as Facebook's (FB  ) Libra project or Apple (AAPL  ) introducing its own payments platform. Another recent example of this is Amazon (AMZN  ) introducing its palm recognition technology in which someone's hand can be used as a credit card.

Amazon One

Amazon's vision is that this scanning technology would be implemented at stadiums, stores, and events to make paying seamless. Given the company's foothold in retail through Whole Foods and Amazon bookstores, it can quickly test it out. If it's successful and popular with consumers, then other retailers would likely use it just like they've started using payment systems from Apple (AAPL  ) and Google (GOOG  ).

Amazon One uses palm recognition technology which identifies the unique markings of each palm to create a unique, biomarker identity. In the long-term, Amazon believes there are many uses for the technology in terms of security, identification, and storage of health records in addition to payments.

Amazon also said they chose to go with palms over faces like many companies since there's no immediate connection between someone's palm and their identity.

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Amazon is so successful because it's so innovative and willing to take risks. There's' no way it could have become a $1.6 trillion company if they had remained an online bookseller. They grew dominant in their categories and then quickly grew in a horizontal manner.

Some of these endeavors have been massive successes like Amazon Web Services (AWS) which has become the dominant cloud computing platform or their logistics and delivery business. However, there have also been total flops like the Fire phone, Amazon Spark or Amazon payments.

Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has said his philosophy is that the company isn't failing then that it means they are not taking big enough risks. This is the type of attitude that has catapulted Amazon into becoming one of the world's biggest companies.

Another interesting point is that the "palm-based payment" system basically reduces the barrier in physical retail stores of the process of paying for items. Bezos did the same thing online with Amazon Prime, and it has been successful in increasing the number of transactions on the platform and customer loyalty.