Telemart 
Ever since Elon Musk’s “be careful what you wish for” acquisition of Twitter, rumor about America’s first homegrown “super app” has spreaded.
In October, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” According to Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Musk is “thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.” Note that Musk founded X.Com and combined it with Confinity to create PayPal.
For an idea, WeChat, a messaging app from China, began as a messaging service in 2011 and has since evolved into a combination of Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak, and Healthcare.gov — in addition to more than 3.5 million partner “mini programmes” that run inside the app. Since at least September 2021, PayPal and Walmart have teased their own versions of financial super apps, but with far less hype.
Millions of people’s financial life might be the object of competition between Twitter, PayPal, and Walmart. That prompts the following queries: Why are super applications so popular right now in the West? How should we evaluate our development of a super app? How are Walmart, Twitter, and PayPal pursuing this concept? Which candidate has the best chance of winning, or is there room for more than one leader?
Why now?
Though popular throughout Asia, Latin America and Africa, super apps have failed to appear in the U.S. and Europe. If Twitter, PayPal and Walmart are going to change that, we must ask why.
The benchmark of a fintech super app is how much financial activity it can focus into one ecosystem.
“Super apps took hold in Asia because Asian consumers owned under-powered smartphones that weren’t conducive to managing 40 to 50 separate apps,” according to Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors. In the U.S. and Europe, smartphones didn’t have the control or memory challenges typical of the hardware in less developed regions, so super apps were never a requirement.
A super app just offers ease and security for Western consumers, not a clear solution to their dilemma (both debatable). Nevertheless, you could make the case that such an app could provide options for financing, banking, and credit-building to the underbanked or unbanked, who may be either excluded from or wary of mainstream financial services.
So why now?
Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon have surpassed Twitter in the digital advertising market. Payment processing is becoming a more crowded, competitive market, and PayPal is overly dependent on it. Walmart, which has traditionally lagged behind Amazon in digital, is overdue to try something new.
For these titans, super applications are a brand-new and uncharted field.
