I worked on two super apps for a good part of the last decade; one in India and one in South East Asia so here's my take based on those experience. As the arti

I worked on two super apps for a good part of the last decade; one in India and one in South East Asia so here's my take based on those experience. As the article points out, most of the are trying to apply the playbook of WeChat. IMO it succeeded because they built an enormous user base which has a terrific daily engagement. Once daily engagement is cracked it becomes not all that hard (but not trivial) to add more use cases. P2P payments, file sharing, and you name it. However, in India and SEA the companies tried to go the other way. To take Indian example, most of the fintechs in their quest to increase engagement began adding chat. However, by then people had adopted to WA so it miserably failed. But they still kept at it and added more fintech related use cases; to take PayTM as an example one could do just about anything around payments with that. Insurance, toll payments, utility payment, pay to merchant, pay off EMIs, investments and what not. So they did achieve decent daily engagement. Grab has been trying to do the same. Going from Taxi app to a generic payments app. It's all about engagement. It's an enormous investment though. Not only about rolling out features but also to build two sided market places (example; merchant payment requires onboarding merchants too), onboarding utilities etc., However the profit from them are minuscule despite good utilisation because the recipient of the payment (like merchant, or utility providers) isn't going to give away their share of money. So, in the end all the fintechs resort to lending which is the biggest chunk of profit generator. It's a shame that the article doesn't mention it.