By Tabita Diela
JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia’s Bank Jago aims to crunch transaction data supplied by local technology giants to create customer profiles and market financial products, as the digital lender targets profitability this year, its chief executive told Reuters.
Ride hailing and payments company Gojek, which owns a 22% stake in the bank via its fintech arm Gopay, is in the process of merging with e-commerce company Tokopedia to form GoTo in Indonesia’s biggest ever deal.
Bank Jago, which also counts Singapore’s GIC as an investor, is negotiating so that clients can open and manage bank accounts from Gojek’s app this quarter, and later loan applications, chief executive Kharim Indra Gupta Siregar said in an interview.
The bank will seek customer approval to access travel, food purchases and other transaction data, he said, adding this would help assess eligibility for credit.
“Their daily lifestyle can be information for us,” Siregar said.
The lender is still in talks with Tokopedia on potential cooperation, he said.
“With Tokopedia coming into the picture, it creates another digital ecosystem that can be partnered up with Bank Jago and clearly it will be foolish not to pursue,” he said.
Gojek claims to have 170 million users across Southeast Asia, while Tokopedia says it has over 11 million merchants and more than 100 million active monthly users in Indonesia.
Veteran Indonesian banker Jerry Ng, who was behind one of the country’s first digital banks, bought Bank Artos in 2019 and rebranded it as Bank Jago with the aim of creating a leading player in the country’s digital banking market.
Shares of Bank Jago has soared more than 3,600% since Ng’s acquisition.
Bank Jago currently extends loans though partnerships with peer-to-peer lenders and savings via investment fintechs, which Siregar expects will help the bank book a profit in 2021 for the first time since its rebranding.
But it faces competition as traditional lenders, like Bank Central Asia (BCA), and other tech groups including, Sea Group’s SeaBank Indonesia and Softbank-linked LINE Bank, enter the arena.
“Like in any other industry, the more you have competition, as long as it’s a healthy competition, it’s actually very very good for the customers,” Siregar said.
($1 = 14,476.0000 rupiah)
(Additional reporting by Fanny Potkin; Editing by Ed Davies)
