Popular ride-hailing service Go-Jek has agreed to acquire three local financial technology companies to strengthen its grip on the digital-payment market.
Go-Jek already has a digital payment service in operation called Go-Pay, but the new deal brings 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, is expected to make payment on its app accessible to more people through different payment channels.
“We are now taking Go-Jek to the next stage,” founder and Chief Executive Officer Nadiem Makarim said in the statement, as quoted by Bloomberg. “This marks a significant development in our position at the heart of Indonesia’s vibrant fintech industry.”
Collectively, 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.
The move by Go-Jek further heats up competition with rivals Grab, who acquired e-commerce platform Kudo earlier in the year and also announced this week that it has reached a partnership agreement with popular local payment app Paytren.
Go-Jek, which is Indonesia’s first $1 billion startup backed by KKR & Co., Warburg Pincus and Tencent Holdings Ltd, started out solely as a motorcycle taxi-hailing service to offer a solution to Indonesian longstanding traffic problem. However, it has now grown to become 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.