This Chart Offers A Great Clue To Amazon's Secret New 'Ambitious' Mobile Payments Plan

As we've previously reported Amazon has quietly bought mobile payments company GoPago and dismissed most of its employees.

Word of the sale first came when co-founder Vincenzo Di Nicola talked about the acquisition to Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

Since Amazon didn't keep most of GoPago's 70-employees, including cofounder Di Nicola, Amazon was clearly acquiring the tech, not a company that would continue to run and develop as an independently owned entity. In fact, one GoPago customer we talked to said that he can no longer get anyone to answer his calls.

Di Nicola said in that same article that the GoPago tech will be at the heart of a new, "ambitious" project at Amazon.

What does that mean? We don't know. But we can speculate:

GoPago makes a Square competitor that lets people pay for stuff at restaurants and retailers with their smartphones, a tech that's sometimes called a "digital wallet."

Seems likely that the GoPago tech could become part of Amazon's new "Log in and Pay" service that lets you pay for stuff on other ecommerce sites through your Amazon account.

But it could be that Amazon is building its own internal mobile payments tech to compete more directly with PayPal or Square.

In fact, Forrester Research recently looked into how Amazon would fair if it did this. Answer: pretty good. With no product and no marketing on Amazon's part, 23% of North American online consumers would trust Amazon to provide them with a digital wallet.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.