7 July 2021

The eternal beauty of the single-button app

Welcome to the new world of super apps; we don’t plan to stay long. 
The eternal beauty of the single-button app

Some financial products are continuously adding more and more features to become what is now known as super apps – one app, one sign-in, one user experience - sometimes they even start calling themselves ‘marketplaces’. That’s what happened to Revolut, and what Paypal has just announced. Am I totally wrong in suggesting that those who do it are simply obsessed with the idea of customer retention? “Let’s lock’em up in this app!”. 
 
Think of a multi-purpose office machine that brings together fax, printer, and scanner. Did it ever do any of these things correctly? There were always issues. The world has certainly moved on since then, and fax is not really needed, but the simplicity that can sort you out is still very much appreciated. 
 
Many FinTechs entered the financial services scene to disrupt and challenge old-school banks and people fell in love with them because they were lighter and easier to understand. I’d open the app, do what I need to do quickly, close it and move on. It was never my plan to stay there forever. 
 
My fellow co-founder ED is an ideologist of simplicity. He thinks a service has to fulfill the core function and be straightforward. Think Shazam - a gold standard of a single-button app. This what we are trying to deliver at 3s.money.

Payment is a core product, money comes in and money goes out, if we can make you spend less and less time managing your payments - we win. 

Ivan Zhiznevskiy, CEO and Eugene Dugaev, CTO

This simplicity comes at a hefty price — hiding payment rails and myriad complexity behind a simple UI or challenging clients with the right questions during their onboarding. We are operating in a very fragmented and uneven technological environment where we need to be equally prepared to work with the latest real-time technologies for payments and FX, as well as classic “dinosaurs” like MT messages from swift or file exchange.
 
We are campaigning for a world where people spend less time on their phones, less time in apps, and more time doing business. 

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