Lydia adding trading is a small step to super app status

The news: The France-based fintech partnered with digital broker Bitpanda to offer users access to fractionalized shares, ETFs, and crypto trading from €1 ($1.14).

Why add trading? Lydia started out as a peer-to-peer payments platform but has been adding new services to cover all of its users’ financial needs, enhancing its value proposition.

• Over the past two years, it has added personal loans between €100 ($114) and €3,000 ($3,421) and a savings account with 0.6% interest.
• Each new feature opens the app to another revenue stream and creates a stickier proposition for its 5.5 million users.
• The interest-bearing and trading accounts, for example, allow users to put cash to work that would have otherwise sat idle while waiting for peer-to-peer payment transfers.
• Trading in particular should also drive its user acquisition. Like others across the globe, French consumers are increasingly investing. The timely launch comes just ahead of other European digital brokers expanding to France, like Freetrade.

The big takeaway: Lydia describes itself as a super app, but it has a long way to go to live up to that name.

• Insider Intelligence defines a super app as a digital ecosystem of products and services housed under a single application and user experience.
• Our “Financial Super Apps Matrix” offers a snapshot comparison of eight leading financial super apps worldwide. Western fintechs like US-based PayPal and UK-based Revolut are rebundling services to emulate the successes of early super apps, such as China-based WeChat and AliPay.
• Lydia’s new trading feature is part of its own super app strategy and will likely draw on its $131 million Series B funding from December to continue expanding its product suite.
• However, our matrix covered 57 features per super app. Lydia, by comparison, has just 11—underscoring that it has a long way to go to achieve the same breadth of services.