Not so far away in the summer of 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to America, which gradually changed not only the way we communicate, but also aspects of economic reality that were not obvious at that time, but were not obvious to many. expected.

Let’s take things from the beginning. The obvious reason why the iPhone sparked the revolution that followed was due to the transformation of the phone into a smart device that, when combined with the Internet, offered possibilities that had previously belonged to the realm of science fiction. Today, 83.72% of the world’s population, or 6.64 billion people according to Statista, owns such a smart device, and you, who read this, are probably one of them.

A less obvious reason has to do with what happened a few months later: On July 10, 2008, Apple launched the App Store, an online hub where iPhone owners could view and download third-party apps. This event has become perhaps the most defining moment in recent years for a number of industries, from computing to e-commerce and banking. Today, there are 2.11 million apps in the App Store, while there are even more in the Google Play Store, around 3.48 million (data from Statista, Google).

A few years earlier, in 2004, in another corner of the world in China, a company called Alibaba established a subsidiary called Alipay to allow millions of Chinese who didn’t have credit or debit cards to shop at its online store. Similarly, a year later, another Chinese company called Tencent introduced its own version of the payment system, designed to keep users on their messaging app longer.

It’s worth noting that Alibaba is China’s equivalent of Amazon, while Tencent is Meta (formerly Facebook).

Today, these apps, AliPay and WeChat (as Tencent’s payment app is known), each have over 1 billion registered users, and a survey showed that 92% of people in China’s largest cities use them as their primary means of payment. But not only as a means of payment. All (without exaggeration) aspects of the daily life of people in China are connected with these applications: from paying bills to transferring money, buying insurance products, saving, borrowing through personal loans, finding hotels and tourist accommodation, accessing government services, ordering food, finding suppliers . all kinds of tickets, finding taxis and even meeting accommodation needs, just to name a few of the services.

These services, which began as specialized payment methods, have managed to become an integral part of their users’ daily lives and have gradually expanded to cover dozens of other needs, with the advantage of being the main point of entry or contact for consumers in a vast ecosystem. products and services that can be processed with a simple click of a button and especially on your mobile phone. It is no coincidence that about 80% of active AliPay users are mobile users.

Today, 6.6 billion people on the planet own a smartphone.

Tellingly, it was through these apps that the people of Shanghai, China, were desperately trying to get essentials (food, even medicine) a few weeks ago, in the midst of the world’s strictest lockdown.

With this in mind, we can now better understand the tremendous importance and also the difference that the concept of specialized applications has brought, which are part of a larger (closed) ecosystem and are at our disposal at the click of a button. The direct connection with consumers, the ability of applications to know the history of purchases and preferences for all aspects of our lives, and the enormous power to make decisions about the potential inclusion or corresponding exclusion of products or services are the main reasons for them both. omnipotence, as well as their success and attractiveness.

Today, we tend to collectively characterize this all-powerful app model as “dinner apps,” given that it takes its name from Greek-born Mike Lazaridis, founder of BlackBerry, the company that dominated business communications until someone named Steve Jobs launched it. iPhone in 2007.

It should be emphasized here that the prevalence of “super” applications in Asia in a broader sense was facilitated by certain factors that are absent in the West. For example, the lack of a traditional payment infrastructure in China, where the reliable credit and debit card networks that form the backbone of cashless payments in Europe and North America, have never been established, combined with the country’s weak regulatory framework in early 2000.

Thus, in the West, without yet having the degree of absolute prevalence that we have described above, we find the harbinger of “super” applications in the form of digital wallets, which appeared much later than in China, and mainly as applications that developed through electronic wallets. commerce like PayPal or Venmo and Cash App in America.

As our consumer habits change rapidly, it is inevitable that we will also see in our country – both in Europe and Greece – popular applications that, having as a springboard the basic payment services or digital wallets, will expand to include much broader offerings. . that they will combine loans, investments, insurance, tickets, e-commerce and digital banking.

* Mr. Panagiotis Criaris is a business leader in financial services and financial technology.