Super apps like Alipay, WeChatPay, Grab and PhonePe have been able to corner their respective markets by offering consumers a one-stop shop for payments, commerce and social media in a dynamic that many U.S.-based banks and payments companies have tried to replicate. But creating an all-encompassing mega app is no easy lift.
A super app is a single application, sometimes with micro applications, that essentially “runs your life,” Aaron Press, research director of worldwide payment strategies at IDC, told American Banker. “It’s where you spend a significant portion of your mobile online life.”
For example, users of WeChatPay in China “almost use nothing else,” Press said. “It’s their instant messaging app, it’s their social media app and it’s their financial app. That’s a key that makes it a super app as opposed to merely a wallet: the other things that you do online happen there.”
Alipay is another example of a super app in China, as is Grab in Southeast Asia. In India, PhonePe and Paytm also fit the bill by offering a large number of use cases for consumers and achieving the scale of usage required of a super app in their respective markets, Suraya Randawa, head of omnichannel experience at Curinos, told American Banker.
In the U.S., no one app has control of so many elements of consumers’ life. There are disparate peer-to-peer payments systems, competing social media platforms and a slew of messaging apps that consumers have to choose from with adoption, in many cases, split by generational preferences.
Those factors make creating a super app in the U.S. difficult because American consumers are used to being in an environment where there are multiple solutions that serve multiple problems, Tony DeSanctis, a senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, told American Banker.
“We get as much stuff as we want from Amazon, but we still shop at Target,” he said. “We get as much stuff as we want from Walmart, but we still go to Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
In China, but also in Asian markets more generally, the delivery and development of apps was largely centered around this super app concept, DeSanctis said. “There wasn’t a definitively compelling, proprietary social media platform that was different from the chat platform, that was different from the payments platform, that was different from the shopping platform.
Still, business leaders have expressed their desire to create all-in-one applications. Elon Musk for years – even before his acquisition of Twitter – has touted his desire to build a mega-app. In February, his social network X took its first key steps in facilitating payments with a
Some fintechs are also looking to scale a super app. Bolt in mid-April launched its all-in-one financial services app that combines one-click crypto and everyday payments into a centralized platform.
The app allows users to buy, sell and send crypto with one click, and send money to friends, family or contacts via email, Ryan Breslow, founder and CEO of Bolt, told American Banker.
Users will also have a mobile bank with an account and routing number that they will soon be able to use to deposit checks or withdraw money from an ATM. Bolt also has plans to integrate the app with its merchant network and roll out a debit and credit card program, the latter of which will offer “supercharged” rewards in categories it thinks consumers are spending the most.
“This is very much what WeChat has done with payments, and they dominate China. This is clearly how the world should work,” Breslow said, but noted Bolt didn’t have plans to incorporate any social element, such as messaging, into its super app.
The launch of Bolt’s super app is the culmination of a goal more than ten years in the making, Breslow said. “[Building a super app] is not something that we’ve just decided to do because of the trend. It was in our Series D and E decks from three, four years ago, and it was in our C decks from ten years ago. We’ve always wanted to do this, and we finally feel like our shopper network, our wallets, our tech and our banking partners are ready and primed for us to birth this into the wild.”
Bolt is betting that a convergence of factors will help it achieve the scale necessary for super app success. Shifts in
“Finally, no one has consolidated crypto peer-to-peer mobile banking rewards all in one app in the US.,” he said. “It’s happened in other countries, and we just believe we’re going to be first to market in the U.S.”
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Yet, introducing a super app into a mature market isn’t equivalent to introducing one in an emerging market, where a confluence of market conditions created an environment where super apps could thrive, said IDC’s Press.
“Incumbency is a really strong reason [why super apps were successful],” Press said. “There was no other way to buy things online that was widely available. Bank accounts and debit cards and other payment systems just weren’t there. So these things really filled these multiple needs during a market opportunity that was unique when all these things sprouted together.”
Even for companies that have cracked the super app nut, replicating that success is difficult, Press said.
Take M-Pesa, a Kenyan digital financial services and payments app that popped up in a place where banking was “not all that common” and before social media took off, Press said. “It’s matured quite a bit, and they captured that market very early on.
“But then replicating the success of that in other markets has been incredibly challenging. There’s no place else that uses it the way its original marketplace did – and not for lack of trying,” he said.
Super apps in the U.S. also have to compete with the likes of Apple and Google, which in of themselves are already super apps of sorts, Cornerstone’s DeSanctis said.
“I would argue that the platforms themselves, Apple and Google specifically… are the differentiated functional experience that most folks are looking for, and that all of the other apps and capabilities that are built in are inherently addenda to that solution,” DeSanctis said.
“So someone saying they’re going to build a super app on top of a super app seems sort of redundant and probably perilous,” he said. “Between Google and Apple, now you’re playing for third place, where WeChatPay and Alipay and all these others, they are the end to end experience and it’s all there.”
