In today’s economy, digital disruption is the new normal as the Internet has virtually transformed every segment of the business world. From OTT to P2P, digital disruptors have found new ways of distributing media, information, goods, and even wealth.

Venture capital (VC) has been a major driving force behind the success of digital disruptors as the funds provide much capital to reach a scale to disrupt incumbent players. In the US, disruptors such as Netflix, Amazon, Whatsapp, Airbnb and Uber had taken over much of their brick-and-mortar counterparts. In Southeast Asia, companies such as Go-Jek, Grab, Traveloka, and Tokopedia are doing much of similar effort to carve out significant market share in each of their respective sectors.

Established businesses will have no choice but to respond to these digital disruptors. Technology adoption can happen almost anywhere and at anytime. They must find ways to participate in this adoption or risk decline.

For over the last decade, telecommunication industry has been disrupted by multiple waves of technological advancements. It has happened with Whatsapp taking over significant portions of the voice and text market, with Netflix in premium video content and quite recently, high-profile mega deals such as Go-Jek, Tokopedia, and Traveloka has been marked as the beginning of local tech companies dominating the competitive landscape.

As the wave of digital disruptions are now ‘home-grown’, businesses need to reorganize and respond by launching similar digital initiatives to anticipate the upcoming innovation trends

In particular, industry convergence in financial services is accelerating as Indonesia’s ecommerce giants began to consolidate, and digital transformation is taking place in the financial services sector that requires banks and telecommunications companies to use mobile payment to engage customers that are embedded in the ecosystem.

This paper discusses the trend in Indonesia’s mobile payment from a number of perspectives and explores the reasons why some initiatives succeed and others fail. We believe this paper offers an extensive insight for those who would like to understand further about the current Indonesian payment ecosystem, and what would be the key success factors to win the competition.

The disruptors are here to stay.

 

Sincerely Yours,

Nicko Widjaja | CEO of MDI Ventures