The news: Bolt had added stock and ETF investing to its app via a partnership with investing as a service platform Atomic. The move supports Bolt’s ongoing push past its original focus on one-click checkout to more financial applications.

How it works: Bolt launched its SuperApp in September, including features like crypto trading, peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, some banking features, and an AI shopping agent. Atomic will provide custody, compliance, portfolio management, and operations support for Bolt’s investment offerings.

Bolt tiptoed into investing several years ago. In 2022, it bought cryptocurrency startup Wyre Payments, which enabled users to buy, sell, and hold crypto, as well as exchange crypto and fiat money.

Zoom out: The commerce and banking super app model has been proven viable at scale by fintechs much bigger than Bolt. Cash App, for example, offers P2P payments, a debit card, traditional banking features, stock trading, Bitcoin support, and, recently, an Afterpay integration. PayPal long ago introduced banking and crypto features, is an extremely popular mobile payments tool, and has expanded merchant acceptance and marketing tools.

Implications for banks: Bolt’s app and partnership with Atomic reinforce the “connected commerce” trend, in which shopping, payments, and other experiences are part of a fluid customer journey. Financial institutions (FIs) have been bystanders, watching for years as third-party digital wallets proliferated while they remained the financial product behind a nonbank’s interface.

With the growth of Early Warning Services’ Paze wallet, that oversight is being corrected. Paze could take market share from PayPal and Apple Pay as a bank-centric checkout experience becomes smoother. But for FIs, having banking and investing products does not mean they compete on all fronts. The “connected experience” demands reinvented apps to support it.