Gojek/Tokopedia tie-up poses a question for Indonesian banking regulator

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Gojek/Tokopedia tie-up poses a question for Indonesian banking regulator

Merger shows Indonesia e-commerce coming of age, but can the financial services assets be combined?

Chris Wright on Asia 1920px.jpg

The combination of Gojek and Tokopedia, two leading Indonesian platforms, is no surprise.

It has been telegraphed for a while and became a necessity once GrabGojek’s closest equivalent in southeast Asia – opted out of a merger with its Indonesian counterpart and instead opted to boost its capital through a special purpose acquisition company (Spac) listing.

The new business, to be called GoTo Group, has a lot going for it.

In combination, its legacy businesses had gross transaction value of more than $22 billion through 1.8 billion transactions in 2020, with 11 million merchant partners and 100 million monthly active users supported by a registered driver fleet of two million.

Gojek is Indonesia’s leading ride-hailing, mobile services and payments platform, and an important fixture more widely in southeast Asia; Tokopedia is a tech-smart e-commerce company – toko means shop in Bahasa.

Between them their investor base includes Alibaba, BlackRock, Facebook, Google, KKR, PayPal, Temasek, Tencent and SoftBank; powerful friends, indeed.

Whatever the outcome, the new payments business … will be well-placed in one of the world’s most compelling markets

At Euromoney, our interest in these platforms is always on the financial services side: the way groups such as Gojek and Grab – and Alibaba, Tencent and Paytmuse their e-commerce or mobile chat footprints to underpin nimble and powerful payments businesses that displace the mainstream operations of retail banks.

And


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