The rise of super apps is upon us; the use of these apps have quickly become ingrained into the daily lives of people. The idea behind the creation of a super app started off as the convenience of having a single app with one login. By offering a smooth user experience across products and services, users can have a ‘go-to’ place for whatever they may need. Essentially, super apps serve as single access points for a wide range of products and services.
Super apps first started to gain popularity in China with WeChat. WeChat started in 2011 as a mere messaging app that allows users to also see live updates from friends and family. Over a decade later, it has become an ecosystem of over a million ‘mini-programs’. These secondary apps allow users to do all sorts of things such as applying for a loan, ordering a taxi, ecommerce and plenty more. The beauty about it is, all these transactions occur within the WeChat ecosystem. The platform’s mobile payment and e-wallet service, WeChat Pay has not only taken off in China, but it is also now widely available across 64 countries globally. Now that is expansion!
Grab Holdings (i.e. Grab) on the other hand is Southeast Asia’s leading super app for Deliveries, Mobility and Financial Services in the region. The Singapore-based firm recently announced the agreement to purchase Malaysian supermarket chain, Jaya Grocer as the super app giant expands its deliveries business amid the increased demand for online grocery deliveries. Their payment service, GrabPay is one of the leading e-wallet providers, giving users the convenience of paying for everyday services like bills, groceries, rides, prepaid reloads and more all in a single app.
Whilst super apps have started to take the digital economy by storm, there have been concerns behind the mass adoption of super apps. Experts say that the rise of these super apps hampers online competition and innovation.
The sale of various services on a single platform limits costs, making it difficult for competitors to stay in the game. For example, Grab’s aggressive yet effective strategy left its direct competitor, Uber, to cease operations in Southeast Asia. This left the door open for Grab to acquire Uber’s operations in the region.
What happens, though, when a big competitor leaves and the market is left with an oligopoly or even worse, a monopoly? Unfortunately, with close to no competition or innovation, the development of the digital economy can stagnate. At the end of the day, consumers remain at the losing end of the stick.
Whilst innovation and competition may be hampered, it’s important to recognise the sprouting of super apps does impact the economy positively too. For example, when Indonesian unicorns Gojek and Tokopedia merged to form the GoTo group, it led to the increase in the number of entrepreneurs by approximately 2.3%. The GoTo ecosystem alone makes up about 2% of Indonesia’s total GDP with a projected addition of 2.1% to the national GDP according to research by the University of Indonesia.
If there’s one thing that the emergence of super apps has shown us is that we do not need more individual apps in the space that make up different components of a market; we need more superapps,providing greater convenience and driving the digital economy further and beyond our wildest of imaginations.
However, the emergence of super apps should not just stop in conventional and comfortable territory, what about the blockchain space? At the time of writing, the crypto market is valued at over $2trillion – ignoring this burgeoning sector is to ignore an opportunity set worth trillions, with the potential for significant upwards momentum as mainstream adoption marches on inexorably.
That’s why BAXE is a super app at the forefront of the blockchain revolution in the payments industry. BAXE is a pioneering integrated communications and peer-to-peer exchange platform, leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the innovation behind blockchain technology to create a super dApp which is set to usher in a new paradigm of integrated payment systems.
The beauty about the BAXE dApp is it combines banking-level functionality with high-level, sophisticated communications channels. BAXE brings all these features into an easy-to-use space with an accessible interface. Talk about a super app!
For more information on BAXE, please visit their website here: https://baxe.com/
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