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Bloomberg
Go-Jek, Indonesia’s biggest ride-hailing service, agreed to acquire three local financial-technology companies, underscoring its ambition to become the dominant player in the country’s nascent digital-payments industry.
The deals bring together Kartuku, Indonesia’s largest
offline payments-processing company; Midtrans, the nation’s top online-payment gateway; and Mapan, a local community-based saving and lending network, Go-Jek said.
Go-Jek and the three companies now process almost $5 billion of debit-card, credit-card and digital-wallet transactions for their customers, service providers and merchants. Go-Jek, Indonesia’s first $1 billion startup backed by KKR & Co., Warburg Pincus and Tencent Holdings Ltd., didn’t disclose the value of the acquisitions.
The purchases are the biggest move yet for Go-Jek, which started out by introducing a mobile app in 2015 to let people book cheap motorcycle taxis in traffic-snarled Jakarta. Since then, the company has become a household name in its home country. It’s now Indonesia’s largest food-delivery business and the leading
digital-wallet provider, with 900,000 drivers, more than 125,000 merchants and over 100 million transactions processed through its platform per month.
That has allowed the startup to become the leading mobile-based consumer platform in Indonesia, with 15 million weekly active users.