Twitter Joins the Super App Race

With the recent announcement that Twitter has formed a partnership with fintech eToro to allow users to trade stocks, crypto and other financial assets, the race to create a super app took another turn. In an extra installment of our Financial Super Apps blog series, we will take a look at this potentially momentous partnership. Twitter’s foray represents a significant step in CEO Elon Musk’s oft-stated ambition to turn the social media platform into an all-encompassing super app that allows clients to complete a comprehensive assortment of banking and investing activities.

In a June 2022 company-wide town hall during his winding accquisition of Twitter, Musk expressed admiration for the Chinese super app WeChat and stated that he would seek to mold Twitter after the Chinse app that offers an assortment of features, including messaging, peer-to-peer payment and credit purchases and the ordering of goods and services. In a further attempt to turn Twitter into a do-everything app, the firm has also recently asked its business partners to begin to refer to it as “X Corp.” In an October 2022 tweet shortly before finalizing the acquisition of Twitter, Musk wrote “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”

All that being said, let’s take a look at what exactly Twitter’s partnership with eToro actually means for the user experience so far.

An expansion of the Cashtags feature to cover more instruments and asset classes currently represents the primary addition to the user experience. The trading experience, at least as it currently stands, is cumbersome. eToro’s offerings are not well-integrated within Twitter’s interface. Twitter’s Cashtag feature—which displays quotes information—now features a View on eToro button that leads to an embedded eToro login screen. Users cannot actually execute trades from within Twitter’s app. What is more, they cannot use their Twitter credentials to log into eToro. Users must create a separate eToro account.

Twitter’s integration of eToro certainly does not yet represent a superlative, seamless experience that could serve as the backbone of a super app. The race to establish an American super app is far from over, and far from even nearing the finish line.

Still, given its standing as a popular social media platform, Twitter possesses a unique advantage in the increasingly heated race to develop a dominant super app within the American market. In the days since the launch of the Twitter-eToro partnership announcement, Apple announced that it will begin offerings savings accounts to Apple Card customers. The super app race continues.

For more of CI’s ongoing research into developments and trends within the financial services industry, check out our Insights page. And learn more about our Fintech Monitor and Broker Monitor.