Tata Plans ‘Super App’ To Bring Together Its Consumer Services

Indian conglomerate Tata Group is launching a new app purported to bring together the country’s disparate sales sector to offer a range of consumer goods in a “super app,” the Financial Times (FT) reported.

The app will offer food and grocery ordering, fashion and lifestyle, consumer electronics and consumer durables, insurance and financial services, education, healthcare and bill payments, according to Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, as reported by FT. The app will put the conglomerate in competition with giants of the region like Reliance Industries and global titans like Amazon.

Chandrasekaran said the app would be “a very big opportunity” for the company and have “a lot of apps in apps and so on,” FT reported.

“The Tata Group, depending upon how you count, touches several hundred millions of consumers in India, if you take consumers who are walking in everyday into a Tata facility,” he said, according to FT.

Tata Capital, a division of Tata Group, introduced a new mobile app in May that will allow a better user experience for getting loans. It will come with features allowing for applying and tracking application requests, raise draw-down requests, and let users track transactions and repayment schedules.

Such super apps have not caught on in India or in the west yet, but are popular in China and other parts of the east. Examples include Meituan and Grab, along with WeChat, Alipay, LINE and others. PYMNTS reported that the super app has been a burgeoning trend that caught the eye of the aforementioned Amazon and other big companies like Google, Apple and Uber.

The idea behind the super app is to be the front door that people use to interact for almost anything, PYMNTS reported.

While the apps don’t have to do literally everything a person needs, the purpose is to do away with the cumbersome tasks of switching between multiple apps or devices to get the day’s tasks done.