GO-JEK Pairs With P2P Lenders To Boost FinTech In S. Asia

Indonesian ride-hailing and online payment company GO-JEK is expanding its financial technology services through partnerships with three peer-to-peer (P2P) lending firms: Findaya, Dana Cita and Aktivaku.

“We believe that a strong collaboration between financial services providers and technology companies can reach a wider range of people who have difficulty accessing financial services, such as unbanked communities,” GO-JEK President Andre Soelistyo said in a statement, according to Reuters.

GO-JEK’s payment system GO-PAY launched last year, accounting for more than half of the startup’s transactions. The company integrated GO-PAY into the GO-JEK app, enabling customers to store money on their mobile phones — similar to a digital debit card. Adding to the GO-PAY account can be done from a bank account or ATM. If customers don’t have a bank account, they can hand cash over to GO-JEK’s drivers, and it will be transferred immediately to their account.

“We’ve never seen a market adoption like GO-PAY,” said Nadiem Makarim, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who co-founded GO-JEK in Jakarta in 2010.

GO-JEK said that the partnership with the P2P lenders would be separate from its GO-PAY payment vertical.

In addition to ride-hailing, the company offers other app-based services, such as food delivery or movie tickets. Earlier this year, GO-JEK raised $1.5 billion in venture capital funding from investors that included BlackRock and Google. The funding total was higher than the $1.2 billion the company was hoping to raise, and the funding brought GO-JEK‘s valued to roughly $5 billion.

“GO-JEK is far beyond a ride-hailing app; it’s a digital platform that dominates consumers’ daily lives, including transportation, food delivery, logistics and payment, etc.,” said Xiaofeng Wang, a senior analyst at consultancy Forrester. “That’s also the key value that its key investors like Google and Tencent see. They know well about the power of the digital ecosystem, and GO-JEK has built it in Indonesia, like Google in the U.S. and WeChat in China.”