#superapps are a hot topic as top-down high engagement #fintech innovators intersect with bottom-up commerce platforms to enable their customers “to natively discover, engage, pay and manage day-to-day activities”. Google Plex is no more, leaving the ecosystem wide open for a new champion. Commerce Ventures neatly outlines the product stack of the contenders in the ‘Super App’s’ race. Whilst it’s comprehensive, I feel it misses an important piece of the puzzle that customers want because the reality is they find buying financial products difficult and complex. The glue that binds all these disparate pieces and unifies the customer experience towards delivering augmented outcomes instead of efficient utility provision. Is delivering timely and contextual financial advice recommendations that capture that slice in the middle of the venn diagram where my circumstances intersect with the myriad of rules-based strategies to identify optimal actions to maximize my outcomes. By putting the customers data in context and crafting optimal actionable recommendations or insights at the right time for immediate consideration that enable them to maximize the likelihood of achieving their outcome and minimize the cost or time taken. Automated individualized optimization will drive ‘Super App’s’ – it won’t be offering or consolidating more features. For most people making decisions around money related matters are tedious, laborious, painful, time consuming, and prone to error. Yet they recognize the opportunity and actual cost of not making good choices. They yearn for expert assistance to ensure they make the best choice for their situation because income is inelastic and finite. In much the same way we now rely on ‘navigation optimization’ apps like Waze or Rome2rio , to determine the optimal route dynamically to get us to our desired destination on our chosen mode of transport – they even update our arrival time throughout the journey as conditions vary. To become the ‘Super App’ a table stakes feature will be to seamlessly embed dynamic ‘financial outcome’ optimization. Most of the data is readily available. The challenge is to generate individualized contextual nudges based on: 1)     What the customers wants and when, and trade-off quotients 2)     What their peers are doing because remaining in the herd is important 3)     Exogenous changes factored in instantaneously 4)     Compliance with regulatory requirements Money matters are all inter-connected/ -related from the customers perspective. Balancing these complex relationships is difficult. The contender who simplifies making better financial decisions for their customers will excel. For WePay it was the QR code, for the ‘SuperApp’ the secret sauce will be automated contextual optimization. Nik Milanović Ron Shevlin #bankingtechnology #bankinginnovation Lex Sokolin #money J.P. Morgan Simon Taylor Kelli Nguyen #digitalbanking #banks #innovation https://lnkd.in/ge5V-6aw