Tech giants risk squeezing out banks, French watchdog warns

A file photo of a man demonstrating the mobile payment service Apple Pay at a cafe in Moscow, Russia. The companies that the French agency calls 'les BigTech' are armed with 'considerable financial power' to invest in new technologies and will have lower marginal costs compared to banks. — Reuters

Payment services run by Apple Inc, Google and Amazon.com Inc may need monitoring as the tech giants’ largely unregulated financial products squeeze out those of banks, France’s competition authority warned.

Big technology platforms “have the capacity to draw significant profits without being subject to regulatory constraints weighing on banks”, the authority said in a report on April 29.