Ever since Elon Musk’s “be care what you want for” acquisition of Twitter has sparked speculation about America’s first homegrown “super app.”
October, Musk murmured: “Buying Twitter is what drives the creation of X, which is every app.” I’m thinking about Remember, Musk founded his X.Com and merged it with Confinity to create PayPal.
For context, China’s WeChat started as a messaging service in 2011 and has since grown to include Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak, and Healthcare.gov with over 3.5 million partner combinations. became. A mini-program that runs within an app”. PayPal and Walmart have been teasing their own versions of financial super apps since at least September 2021, with much less fanfare.
Twitter, PayPal and Walmart could compete to monetize the economic lives of millions of people. This raises some questions. Why are super apps so popular in the West now? How should progress towards super apps be measured? How are Twitter, PayPal, and Walmart pursuing this idea? Which one is the most likely to win or is there really room for multiple leaders?
why now?
Super apps are popular in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, but have yet to materialize in the US and Europe. If Twitter, PayPal, and Walmart are trying to change that, we have to ask why.
The benchmark for fintech super apps is how much financial activity can be concentrated in one ecosystem.
According to Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors, “super apps were pushed to Asia because consumers in Asia had underpowered smartphones that were useless to manage 40 to 50 separate apps. In the US and Europe, there was no need for super apps because smartphones did not have the power and memory challenges inherent in hardware in less developed regions.
Additionally, as Axios claims, data privacy concerns, strict banking regulations, and Apple and Alphabet’s control over payments on mobile operating systems have discouraged it from becoming a super app.
Superapps do not solve obvious problems for Western consumers other than providing convenience and security (both of which are debatable). That being said, such apps provide financial, banking, and credit-building benefits to unbanked or unbanked people who are either excluded from mainstream financial services or feared. It can be argued that it may bring opportunities for
So why now?
Twitter lost out to Alphabet, Meta and Amazon in digital advertising. PayPal’s over-reliance on payment processing has become an increasingly crowded and competitive field. Walmart has always been one step behind Amazon in the digital space, but it has been slow to try something its Seattle rival hasn’t.
The Super App represents a fresh, new pasture for these giants.
