The Case for a Super-app in India
I still maintain a bank account in India because my dad lives there. India is a country that fell into the digital era OTP first. There's OTP for everything. So much so that when I visited a few years back, my friend showed me an app that specifically exists to handle OTPs from various merchants so your primary message inbox is saved from the barrage.
Banking takes this to the next level. For most transactions that involve moving money you have to provide a password, OTP, and a transaction pin. There's no standard name for this transaction pin. This is different from the pin you use at the ATM. It expires at a different cadence compared to your password, and is secretly dispatched over snail mail whenever you create an account with the bank. Riveting stuff.
I recently had to go through the flow to change the transaction pin as it had expired. And once it expires some banks don't allow you to make any online transactions anymore. Banks love redesigning their websites, changing domain names, and pop ups. Oh they love pop ups.
For some context, I'm fairly young, grew up with technology, and I've been a software engineer for several years. I'm generally comfortable with navigating the web. I noticed/faced the following problems when I was going through the pin change flow:
- The bank's website has a home page, a login page that's separate.
- When you go to the login page, it just has a giant 'Continue Login' button below the nav-bar and the rest of the page is blank.
- If you click on 'Continue Login' it pops up into a new window where the actual log in flow starts. Unsure why there's an extra webpage; perhaps the programmer who built the website charged by the number of pages they set up.
- The log in page doesn't allow you to copy paste usernames or passwords.
- The login page has a captcha. (I'm fairly sure the captcha validation is hardcoded to fail your first attempt.)
- The CAPTCHA refreshes every 3 seconds. I swear.
- The transaction pin change flow somehow is the only operation in the history of Indian banking that does not prompt you for an OTP. The flow doesn't tell you this at any point in time.
This is in no way passable as a customer experience in a vibe coded app, let alone something as serious as a banking website. I understand that sensitive operations like banking and utility payments require security in the form of multifactor authentication. It is absolutely a good thing that the semantics of banking work this way.
However, there are several problems with how digital India works. There is no consistency in the concept of a website. Mobile apps have an entirely independent suite of features compared to the website. There is no aesthetic or design consistency between a bank's mobile app and a bank's website. Besides color schemes, it is literally impossible to tell which bank's website/app you're operating. I'm being a uncharitable — if you are on the website, there's the bank's logo splashed above the nav-bar on every page so you can tell I suppose.
The West, thanks to being early adopters of all things technology, eased their citizenry into the digital world starting from ATMs to slow websites to fully functional websites to mobile apps that are consistent in how they operate. UPI like features are still not a thing in the US — although Zelle is catching up quickly.
India has leapt into the digital world, much faster than the West. UPI and mobile banking took over the country almost overnight. This is, also, a good thing. Most people have readily embraced the change, and have become extremely competent and comfortable using this convenient medium of transaction. So much so that I hardly see cash transactions anymore. When Uber launched in India, most cab drivers would cancel your ride request if they learn that you're not going to pay them by cash; not the case a few years since UPI.
These might seem like design complaints or me nitpicking like "ha ha digital India is funny right?" but there is a major problem because of the lack of attention to detail when it comes to digital surfaces in India. Although a majority of India's ~1.4B people are in their 20s and 30s, there's a non-trivial number of people who are senior citizens. And digital India is extremely hostile towards anyone who isn't quite tech savvy.
Constantly changing websites and apps, inconsistency, KYC requests every other month. OTP, crucial announcement texts indistinguishable from spam, no proper TLD for trusted domains, and many more reasons make it a nightmare for most people to traverse the ever increasing internet real estate. The discouraging part is that the humans in the loop are either not empathetic or not knowledgable themselves, or, as it most often is the case, both.
This makes for an extremely scary situation for elders or people in a crisis to handle their day to day. People are constantly bombarded with spam and marketing phone calls that it would be practically impossible to notify people reliably. The sadder part is these institutions don't care. And the consequences are dire, and the authority that should be protective is almost inevitably punitive.
India needs a super-app like WeChat. It's imminent, in fact, it needed it yesterday. There should be one place to do banking, receive notifications from the government, including and not limited to healthcare, rations, elections, and what not. This isn't a news app, this should be a way for the citizens to glean what is truth and what isn't. With AI getting cheaper, democratized, and just so easily accessible and abused, it is extremely important that the policymakers make this a top priority to institute a reliable communication mechanism.
Am I asking for a propaganda machinery to be built? hardly. The toolkit for propaganda exists today. And it will continue to exist tomorrow. But what is missing today is for a pensioner to quickly understand whether the notification about needing to provide a PAN/Aadhar is legit, necessary, or even possible to do offline. There's no way for citizens to seek help or learn about things that are available to them without following a 12 step IVRS menu that's poorly translated in regional languages or worse is in Hindi or English. Completely inaccessible to a large portion of the population.
What a super-app closes doors to is the decades long corruption that plays a vital role in uplifting the economic futures of politicians and government officials. Unfortunately, the country might have to sacrifice some of that for an outsized return in improving the well being of its people.
A simple verified channel that banks, utilities, and local bodies will do wonders to the everyday crisis that is navigating digital India.
I'd say the US also would greatly benefit from such a super-app, but may be that's not the top priority right now. The priority is to may be weather the next few years before trying to improve on the margins.
I've been reading about WeChat for more than 10 years now and it's been incredible to see how it has evolved. This doesn't curtail the growth of other digital applications. You can have your Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, and Twitter fights. Just that your parent or grandparent will not have to feel completely unempowered when navigating their daily realities. I'm around to help my dad navigate this, but I cannot imagine how powerless and dependent he has to feel every time he asks me to help with certain things or his muscle memory becomes useless because the banks have redesigned the website for the seventh time in two years.