Super Apps : Business Intelligence using Personally Identifiable Information(PII)

4 min readMay 6, 2021

You are the contemporary smartphone user with a robust social standing as a netizen across channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Netflix, Swiggy, Google pay, Gmail, and more! For the purpose of this demonstration let’s name our user Mark.

These applications individually carry enormous amount of personalized data about Mark, although this data is siloed from other applications, it can provide significant anonymous labelled insights about him.
Mark is an avid LinkedIn user and keeps up-to-date with his “Daily Reads”, connection requests/sends, messages, and feed. In doing the above activities lets break down the uniquely identified (Mark’s ID) data that it gathers:

Daily Reads & Feeds: Clicks, taps, reactions(likes, dislikes, support, love, insightful), Shares of ads to your profiled data
Connection Requests/sends: LinkedIn works on an accurate recommendation engine which factors in data from your user profile like DOB, UG college, PG college, Location of work, Work company, Duration of work, Overlap years, Current Location, Common Interests, Groups followed, and more

Swiggy on the other hand might map user food preference using a dynamic food intelligence system with FKG(Food Knowledge Graphs) which are then fed into multi-layered neural networks and other ML models for food recommendations and menu curation.

A similar analysis of Netflix or Facebook would offer large majority of unstructured plus structured data. This data is stored into datalakes and used for offering business insights by utilizing core business logic which includes hefty analytics.

All this data about Mark is called Personally Identifiable Information(PII) which when used properly and ethically can offer him a personalized experience or ,as a product manager would say, push the performance features, up the Kano quadrant, to pure delight features by offering the right recommendation/suggestion at the right time.

All said and done, these are multi-billion dollar platform-based business models with (majority of them having) green unit economics. But, none of the applications can be called Super Apps.

Listing a few famous true Super Apps below:

Gojek
Alipay
WeChat
MyJio (early stages, plans to introduce 100+ mini-services)
Just Dial

What are Super Apps and how are they creating a paradigm shift in on-demand multi-service applications?

Imagine having one application which can be used to chat, book a taxi, pay bills, order food, read news, connect on social media, etc. Sort off seems like a platform with myriad of services running in parallel? Yes, that’s a super app from a bird eye view.

The biggest dilemma of adding multiple features in one platform is that it might clutter the UI and provide poor UX, instead of leading to customer delight with bundled offerings. Thus to overcome said issue and provide cross-industry services through one platform Super Apps seem to be the next big thing.

Architecture Design

A native super app can support multiple micro-apps in a fashion similar to cloud platforms offering scalable and modular microservices.

Business Intelligence — PII

Each microapp or mini-service can either be built in-house or a partnership with a business catering to that industry. As shown above, the base native app will spawn multiple micro applications through a serverless architecture with web request and web response calls. These microapps will cater to the specific actionable goals of the customer (Mark in this case). Since the UX offers clean call to action for each service, Mark will not be distracted by the multiple services. In the process the application will curate information about the usage patterns as well as cross-industry on-demand service needs of Mark and build a robust recommendation system within each micro-service. The PII (personal identified information) will be used to get business insights and personalized recommendations using the cloud analytics, visualization and reporting.

As a parting note, to introduce the audience to the world of Super Apps it is highly recommended to read up about the popular ones such as Gojek, Alipay, WeChat.

References:

Super Apps : Business Intelligence using Personally Identifiable Information(PII)

Written by Abhisht Joshi