The stage is set for a fintech showdown
On a humid March day at the tail end of Indonesia’s rainy season, Danial Futaki was in a frenzy. He had planned to enroll in a master’s degree program at the Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya, a city on the eastern tip of the island of Java, but, to secure his place, he had to get a set of documents to the registrar’s office there, more than 750 kilometers away from his rented room in Jakarta.
Luckily, the solution was already in his pocket: Futaki sent the documents using GoSend, the on-demand courier service from tech giant Gojek. He paid using the platform’s payment service, GoPay, the most widely used e-wallet in Indonesia. When he went out to meet the driver, he grabbed a KF94 mask as protection. The trifold mask doesn’t fog up his glasses, and he buys them in bulk from e-commerce platform Tokopedia.
Across Indonesia, life’s daily tasks, from getting groceries to paying bills, can increasingly be accomplished without ever leaving the platforms of the country’s two largest tech companies: ride-hailing and delivery company Gojek and e-commerce site Tokopedia. In May, the two companies formally announced that they would merge to become GoTo Group, an $18 billion giant that brings together an array of functionalities that Indonesians have come to depend on: ride hailing, food and grocery delivery, mobile gaming, financial services, and online retail, all underpinned by payment platform GoPay.
