JPMorgan: Super Apps Set the Stage for ‘Commerce That Follows Consumers’

We look back and take stock of what was in order to gain a roadmap for what will be.

To that end, J.P. Morgan Chase Global Head of Payments Technology Mike Blandina and Global Head of Payments and Commerce Solutions Max Neukirchen said the trends in digital payments set in motion well before 2021 will bring innovations beyond the confines of marketplaces and consumer-focused super apps well after 2022 ends.

Looking back on 2021, they noted that the great digital shift has its roots pre-pandemic, when new payment methods started to gain broader acceptance and multi-site marketplaces became a major economic force.

One would have thought that COVID-19 would have upended everything. As Neukirchen noted, at the end of 2020 and lurching into 2021, vaccines were just starting to be rolled out, and no one was sure how the year might play out.

“Then we saw a strong rebound in the economy, which was reflected in the payment space,” he said. “The strength was reflected not only in volumes, but also with continued innovation, particularly within digital payments.”

Blandina and Neukirchen said the past several months have seen the continued “embedding” of payments, rendering them virtually invisible in various use cases and B2B workflows. And while there’s been much discussion and attention focused on the rise of the consumer super app, as Blandina noted, “there’s a future ‘merchant super app’ out there.”

He said this super app would let merchants interact in a fluid trading environment, with a range of different services on offer. Just as in the consumer world, B2B payments act as the connective tissue between buyers and suppliers across a range of verticals that are in the midst of their own digital transformations. As online markets proliferate, they said, validation and onboarding of merchants are important to make sure the marketplaces (and by extension the super apps they create) are as safe as possible.

Context Matters

For merchants, analytics and infrastructure are key to surfacing relevant financing and other offerings at the right time — and in context.

As Blandina noted, for the marketplaces, “it really starts with what we call trust and safety — which rests with federated identity, which gives you the real understanding of who it is you’re really working with.”

Federated identities, he said, are the bedrock of real-time payments, ensuring a high-trust, low-fraud setting in the seconds it takes to send and receive funds.

There are other ways to cement trust, said Blandina, who pointed to blockchain as an option; the decentralized, immutable ledger has its place within payments. And, said Neukirchen, “we are looking very carefully” at decentralized finance (DeFi) “and use cases where exchange of information could become faster and easier,” especially in know your customer (KYC), when access by all parties to the same information right away makes ecosystems safer.

J.P. Morgan, said Blandina and Neukirchen, are seeking to integrate checkout (in an Uber-like fashion), a range of payment options and financial services more broadly into the software industry. With the aid of a single data lake, they noted, J.P. Morgan can provide account validation ahead of time and craft an opportunity where consumers move between environments and toggle across connected devices — and where contextualized, personalized offers travel with individuals in real time.

“The consumer winds up being the channel,” said Blandina, “allowing them to transact wherever they are, with little interaction with a physical wallet.”