RISE OF THE SUPER-APPS: SCALING THE HEIGHTS As Curve prepares for a full launch in the States, Founder & CEO Shachar Bialick sets out why it will succeed in its super-app mission – and why others might fail What do US grocery chain Walmart, French healthcare insurtech Alan, UK challenger bank Revolut and Mexican buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform Kueski have in common? Answer: they are among dozens of companies worldwide to have declared their ambition to build a financial services super-app – a project that the CEO and president of payments giant PayPal admits is one of the most difficult that it, too, has undertaken. PayPal is going for global scale – its president Dan Schulman is quoted as saying that around one billion users would be ‘ideal’ and it’s been busy acquiring companies to populate a super-app ecosystem that can deliver it. Those acquisitions include operators across buy now, pay later (BNPL), crypto, logistics and internet search capabilities. Without the capital resources of a PayPal and with a slightly less ambitious geographic horizon – indeed, its founder is quoted as saying that ‘it would be highly improbable that a single super-app takes over the world’ – Curve is steadily building a similar proposition in Europe and the US, but by stealth. Seven years ago, just as challengers reached a feeding frenzy, tearing chunks out of the traditional consolidated banking model to offer up discrete services, Curve launched its ‘over-the-top’ card aggregation technology in the UK – correctly predicting that the inevitable consequence of things breaking apart was that, before
too long, there would be a great ‘rebundling’ – and it would be ready for it. The logical conclusion of the re-bundling process is for a number of powerful providers to emerge with propositions that, ultimately, take care of all of a user’s financial needs, plus some. In other words, in Curve’s genesis was its destiny: to become a super-app. Indeed, in its new report, The Race To The Super App, fintech-focussed advisor FT Partners observes that Curve ticks all the necessary boxes to succeed. The report identifies a super-app’s defining characteristics as being able to deliver greater value, in terms of a user’s time, money and customer experience, than the user would receive by going to individual apps for each product; and it must have a large and engaged base of customers who are willing to expand their interactions with the app – because the super-app business model is dependent on cross-selling: “Every incremental product sold to an existing customer comes with essentially zero consumer acquisition cost (CAC), making these cross-selling opportunities highly profitable,” the report said It also noted that, in the past 12 months, Curve has changed its place in the super-app food chain: having started out as a pure, ‘over the top’ aggregator model, it’s now taking a hybrid approach, no longer just connecting customers to third-party accounts, but offering in-house products as well. Having worked with regulators to allow its proprietary tech to bring ground-breaking new tools to market, such as its ‘go-back-in-time’ feature (savvy users can flip transactions between their cards after payments have been processed – thus beating fees and interest and easing cash flow), Curve launched its own flavour of BNPL in
2021, a tool called Flex, under the slogan ‘F*** it… not what you think!’. It’s all going nicely to plan, according to the man who wrote the pitch-deck for what was known as ‘Plastic’ back in 2015 – Curve founder and CEO, Shachar Bialick. “I think you can measure the strength of a vision by looking at what that vision was in the early days of the company and what that vision is today,” he says. “Instead of us changing the vision, the market evolved as we predicted it would – which put us in a unique position as the ultimate aggregator in that market. Now, we only need to keep growing the geography and product activity.” It’s worth noting that Bialick’s pitch-deck also included a BNPL prototype. “There’s a slide on the deck that tells you we will introduce the ability to pay with instalments anywhere in the world,” he says. “I’m from Israel and you can go into any merchant there and ask to ‘pay in three’. That’s existed since I was one year old. So, I knew it was a great product, but I also knew we could make it much better. “About two-and-a-half years ago, we started to put investment towards Curve Flex, hired a team led by Paul Harrald (a former credit and risk advisor at Google) as head of Curve Credit globally, and started to apply for licences in the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA). The BNPL market then became super-hot and we are there with everyone else, but offering a unique experience that no one else can.” That unique experience is tied to the app’s go-back-in-time feature, which also allows users to revisit payments made up to a year before, split them into three, six, nine or 12 monthly instalments and be refunded the original amount by Curve. “We saw BNPL five years ahead of time and acted on it two years ahead. That’s why it’s important to have a clear direction and vision of where things could go,” says Bialick. “And, while sometimes that means you’re, in effect, taking bets,
Super-charg 52
ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 11
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