The Gold Rush For India's Superapp

One ring to rule them all. More accurately, one app to serve them all. For the country’s largest conglomerates, blue-chip banks and e-commerce majors, the SuperApp is the next battleground.

- Debojyoti Gosh

LATE LAST YEAR, when billionaire entrepreneur Gautam Adani announced his undisclosed investment in online travel aggregator Cleartrip — part of the Walmart-owned Flipkart group — the motive was explicit: to build a SuperApp by bundling a host of services on a single platform. For Adani, it means encapsulating an empire spanning fast-moving consumer goods [FMCG], power & gas utilities, airport management, data centres, ports and real estate. “The Cleartrip platform will become an essential part of the broader SuperApp journey we have embarked upon,” says Gautam Adani, chairman, Adani Group.

Besides Adani, the who’s who of India Inc. has embarked on to the next frontier in e-commerce—the SuperApp. Clouded in secrecy, some of India’s biggest conglomerates, etailers, banks and aggregators are capitalising on the growing App-fatigue to deliver an all-inclusive digital experience to consumers with an eye on their loyalty — and spending power. Their weapon of mass invasion: the SuperApp.

Reliance Industries Ltd. [RIL], the Tata group, Amazon, Flipkart, and Paytm are keeping the details of their SuperApp close to their chest but their actions leave a trail of their aspirations. Even large banks such as the State Bank of India, HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank see it as a natural extension of their businesses.

In an age defined by hyper-targeting, hyper-personalisation and multi-platform consumers, the power of one is increasingly the superpower that everyone is after, says Piyush Sharma, executive-in-residence, UCLA, and a C-suite+ and start-up advisor. And that power can come from a SuperApp.