By Konstantin Bukin, Managing Director at Saritasa, a full service mobile, web, software, 3D and IoT technology solutions provider.
Banks, credit unions, and financial institutions are the foundation of consumer financial services, yet they lag when it comes to technology. Consumers use smartphones and the internet to manage every speciality of their daily lives, from booking a vacation to delivering their meals. However, when it comes to financial services, the financial industry has yet to reservation up with third-party financial applications. People are increasingly turning to neobanks, e-wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, funds transfer applications like Venmo, retail services like Square, and other software to manage their financial lives. Financial super apps can restore banks as the focal point for consumers financial needs.
Todays digital natives are increasingly frustrated with using multiple apps to manage their lives. Consumers dont want to deal with multiple interfaces and learn how to use new tools to manage everyday activities. They want service providers like banks to provide all their services in one place.
Granted, banks and credit unions have made strides in creating mobile financial apps. However, the user wits leave much to be desired. Many traditional wall apps have limited functionality and plane re-direct to web browsers. People want easy wangle to increasingly than vital financial services.
Revolut, a European wall and fintech company, handles everything related to personal finance in a single app. Similarly, Square is expanding from simple retail e-commerce transactions to subtracting banking, marketing, and staffing services for small businesses. The future of online financial is super apps that simplify all aspects of money management through a single, easy-to-use interface. If traditional banks dont start investing in financial super apps soon, theyll be left in the dust.
What Are Super Apps?
Super apps are rhadamanthine increasingly popular in consumer markets worldwide. For example, WeChat in China combines social media, chat, self-ruling messaging and calling, mobile payments, and increasingly in a single app. WeChat has increasingly than 1.26 billion zippy users making it the largest standalone mobile app. Other apps, such as Alibaba and Alipay, are gaining similar momentum.
Fintech companies like these are breaking lanugo barriers to entry for emerging financial services and bundling them in applications that consumers find appealing. In markets like Asia, with a sizable underbanked population and widespread adoption of smartphone technology, these super apps provide all the essential services needed via a single app.
In North America, large banks and financial institutions have a large repeater user wiring looking for mobile financial services. According to Statistica, there will be 216.8 million digital financial users by 2025. Chase has increasingly than 18.5 million checking worth customers and 25 million debit vellum users. Wells Fargo has increasingly than 70 million customers. Wall of America has 68 million customers. Any of the big banks have a user wiring large unbearable to warrant the minutiae of a super app. Plane mid-size and smaller banks can goody from a financial super app that offers increasingly user-friendly services and promotes consumer loyalty.
Super Apps Are Misunderstood
For various reasons, super apps like WeChat dont exist in the United States. Americans have wilt used to using variegated apps for variegated needs, despite stuff less convenient. Its not unusual to have 25 or increasingly financial relationships, each with its own mobile app to manage the account.
Interestingly, consumers play little role in driving the demand for service bundling. Rather, fintech competitors lead the charge. PayPal, Venmo, and other fintech services want to grow, and the easiest way to do that is to add functionality. As a result, banks are seeing increased competition from emerging fintech super apps. Banks need to expand the capabilities of their mobile financial apps to remain competitive.
Financial institutions moreover need to understand the true value of super apps. A super app isnt just a stow of related services. Its an unshortened ecosystem offering a unified wits to succeed various tasks. All those functions operate within the walled garden of the super app.
Super Apps Can Be Bankings Secret Weapon
Super apps promise to be the competitive differentiator banks need to increase deposits and expand their business. Banks can readily expand their current mobile financial platforms to include spare services, such as:
- Chatbots for consumer support
- International mart and currency services
- Cross-border transactions and payments
- Central management of multiple accounts
- Retirement planning and investment tools
- Household budgeting tools
- Tax numbering and payment
- Credit cards and credit line management
- Stock market investment and management
- Income and expense tracking for small businesses/freelancers
- Cryptocurrency support
These are just a few value-added services banks can offer via a super app, giving customers increasingly tenancy over their finances from one location and a largest consumer experience. Deploying super apps moreover gives banks increasingly wangle to consumer data to create a increasingly personalized experience. And super apps make it easier to offer new financial services that generate increasingly revenue for banks.
Thanksto mobile computing, Americans have been looking to non-financial companies like Apple, Google, and plane Starbucks for app-driven financial services. Now is the perfect time for banks to reuse tenancy of consumer finances by towers their own super apps. Third-party developer resources and financial mini-apps are readily misogynist and affordable. There will still be super apps like WeChat and Revolut, but theres plenty of room for banks to create their own super apps to meet consumer needs surpassing they wilt relics of a pre-digital era.
