![]() This partnership with AliPay helped Safaricom accelerate the rollout of the M-Pesa super app in a short time. In order to build and launch the M-Pesa super app, Safaricom partnered with AliPay which is also a popular super app in China with 1.3B users as of 2022. This is no mean feat for a local mobile app in Kenya! ![]() In fact, as of November 2021, only 5 months after it was launched, it had 3.9M+ downloads and 2M+ monthly active users (MAUs). I personally have used the M-Pesa super app since it was launched and mostly because of its refined and user-friendly experience for making M-Pesa payments. The name accurately suggests that M-Pesa underpins most of the utility of the app for payments. In July 2021, Safaricom took the bold step to launch its own consumer-facing super app and aptly named it the M-Pesa super app. Safaricom looms increasingly large over all things digital in Kenya and East Africa. The Safaricom digital ecosystem is as intricate as it is expansive - from having the most mobile subscribers to being the biggest internet service provider (ISP) and also the largest fintech through its ubiquitous M-Pesa mobile money service. My sense is that there are strong similarities between Kenya and Africa where we never had a computer revolution, but rather, a mobile revolution.Īs we come to Kenya, there is no doubt that Safaricom is not only the biggest brand outright but also one that provides a myriad of mobile and digital offerings at scale to millions of consumers and thousands of businesses. This nuance is probably driven by the fact that consumer behavior and socio-economic drivers are greatly enabled by a mobile-first paradigm and as such this means everyone does everything via their mobile devices. There seems to be one peculiarity about super apps from my own observations - they seem to have been most successful in Asia. Finally, Indonesia's GoJek is yet another super app that has over 170M users. ![]() ![]() Grab has 670+ users in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. Grab is another very popular super app in South East Asia for transportation, food delivery, and digital payments. WeChat is a popular super app that incorporates instant messaging, social media, and payments. Indeed, by far, the poster child of all super apps has to be China's WeChat. In many ways, this seems to be completely true with some of the world's most successful super apps. In the context of super apps, we could as well rephrase this to, "one app to rule them all" The concept always brings to my mind the famous line from J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: "One ring to rule them all". The ultimate goal of a super app is to provide users with a single platform that can meet most of their diverse digital needs, without the need to download and use multiple separate apps for different use cases. A super app will also usually have 'mini-apps' embedded in it that users can use as needed from within the super app. Typically, a super app may include social networking, e-commerce, banking, messaging, food delivery, transportation features, etc. What is a super app? If you go online, it's broadly defined as a mobile app that combines multiple services into one platform.
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