• In the last year alone, Citi, BBVA, Capital One and other major banks have opened their APIs to third party developers to innovate better and faster

• To truly be customer-first and prioritize the customer experience above all, banks should look to platforms as business models, not tech constructs

No one knows if Amazon will be buying a bank anytime soon, but more and more, it’s becoming a shining example of how banks themselves should be running their businesses.

Banks have embraced the idea that their own customers want new products delivered by new financial startups — the savings and management apps, authentication and security tools and money movement capabilities — but to truly put the customer experience first (as so many say they do) they should show the customers they’re here to give them what they want. That means instead of collaborating with young startups on building technology, they should make themselves a distribution channel with different financial products — just like Amazon does.