SAVL Super App: How the Pocket Swiss Bank for the Crypto Industry Works

In February 2020, PayPal chief Dan Schulman stated his intention to turn the PayPal mobile payments app into a super app (SuperApp): to add a messaging feature and “additional cryptocurrency capabilities”.

The team behind the super app SAVL explains what super apps are and why users want them.

From Apps to Super Apps

In 2009, Apple launched an iPhone advertising campaign under the slogan “There’s An App For That”. In this way the company signalled to users that by the time the phone was released the App Store would host a large number of apps for various needs.

However, in 2010, Research In Motion founder Mike Lazaridis predicted the consolidation of apps into closed ecosystems with a “holistic user experience”. He called such ecosystems super apps.

The trend of creating super apps emerged after the app boom of 2013-2016.

Anna Mikhina, vice president for the development of lifestyle services at Tinkoff considers that these changes are linked, among other things, to the high cost of creating single-service apps:

“It’s expensive for a business to maintain several apps. Separate budgets are needed to attract new users, separate development teams. There are also areas with low frequency of use that are more logical to add as a button in the main app. Now apps are starting to accumulate within themselves similar services, so that the user doesn’t go somewhere else.”

Thus, SAVL developers chose the niche of mobile cryptocurrency apps. The super app includes:

• A P2P platform for cryptocurrency trading;
• A multi-currency crypto wallet supporting Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, XRP and ERC-20 tokens;
• A messenger with end-to-end encryption for communication and discussing trades;
• A news aggregator for cryptocurrencies.

At the same time, the project team notes that it does not aim to integrate all possible services into SAVL:

“We have created a platform to solve users’ everyday tasks—a pocket Swiss bank. They can discuss deal terms, buy cryptocurrencies, and manage assets—and all in one smartphone app.”

The super app does not meet the needs of some market participants, for example miners and professional traders. Nevertheless it relieves users from having to create multiple cryptocurrency wallets and register on different trading platforms.

Conclusions

Super apps are evolving and are no longer the WeChat-like monsters that aim to cram every possible function into a single app. They are increasingly offering interconnected services in a defined domain.

The SAVL team is building a mobile app that will make working with cryptocurrencies simpler and more accessible. The developers are not overloading it with services better suited to use on multi-monitor desktop computers.

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