The West Is Finally Catching On to Super App Benefits

While the digital world waits for the metaverse to become something tangible, the super app is gaining momentum and fast becoming the next significant digital development for businesses and consumers.

Super apps have been creeping under the radar in some ways, growing in plain sight without being called out as a major trend.

That could be because they have traction in Asia, Latin America, Africa and countries like Russia and Kazakhstan but less in more established and developed markets in the Anglosphere countries and Western Europe.

Bolt, for example, is a super app which originated in Estonia and has expanded in Europe and Africa. It started as a ride-hailing service and has added new applications such as payment services, food delivery, voice and text and employment.

Privat24 is a banking and financial services app in Ukraine, and its applications span insurance, travel, biometric authentication and bill splitting.

In Southeast Asia, there is Grab, which markets itself as the "everyday everything" app. At the same time, in Indonesia—a country with a population of 270 million plus—there is Gojek.

China’s WeChat is the best-known and most prominent example of a super app. It began as a messaging tool but now offers a whole suite of applications spanning e-commerce, gaming, travel and ride-hailing with Didi, the Chinese equivalent of Uber.

All these apps have the characteristics of the super app. They combine diverse services within a single platform, allowing users to quickly move between applications without downloading or accessing them separately.

Super apps are strong in B2B markets, with B2C lagging behind. In 2022, the total market size was USD58 billion globally, but by 2032, this is expected to grow to USD722 billion.

The Gartner view is that large enterprises are actively building workforce super apps “to consolidate and potentially replace an array of customer and vendor-supplied apps that are complex to manage and lack user adoption.”

“Some consumer and business software providers are evolving their digital products and applications into super app platforms to create a broader ecosystem powered by mini apps,” Gartner says.

Significant upside

Andrew Tomlinson, the chief market officer at UK-based financial solutions provider Calastone, called out super apps in a presentation he made last week in Sydney.

Calastone is a global funds network which connects the fund management industry and processes GPB250 billion of investment value each month.

It leads the way with automation and tokenization in the global finance industry. Tomlinson has a continual watching brief on digital innovation.

“There are currently 2.7 billion active users of just the top fifteen super apps today,” Tomlinson said, quoting Gartner.

These top fifteen had been downloaded more than 4.6 billion times.

"Although as yet, when you look at the western markets, there has been very little progress.”

Tomlinson mentioned the U.K. app Revolut, which offers an array of innovative financial services, as a potential super app, "but it isn't there yet."

"When you have trust and people will transact through you, that is very powerful."

Many people are watching what Elon Musk does with X, formerly Twitter. Given his experience with PayPal, will Musk turn X into a Western super app such as WeChat?

Until now, all the focus is on what Musk is doing with the messaging functionality. However, it would be no surprise if he had some transformative plans. Similarly, Uber has the potential to expand into other areas and already has a vast user base to leverage.

So, with traction low in many developed markets, however, the potential upside is significant.

Gartner, for example, has forecast that up to 50% of the global population could become daily active users of super apps by 2027 and use more than one.

One catalyst for growth in developed markets, pointed to by Calastone’s Tomlinson, is open data legislation in markets such as Australia.

This would play into the two critical features of super apps: trust and convenience.

“When you have trust and people will transact through you, that is very powerful," said Tomlinson.

"And that will drive new behaviors and expectations from consumers worldwide."

Speaking to a room full of fund managers, Tomlinson said many of these super apps were already selling investment products.

“So, are they a threat to your business or an opportunity,” he said.

“Realistically, they are probably a bit of both.”

Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their business models. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/Ljupco