Akulaku is probably the best known disruptor in Indonesia’s fintech space. It started off as Silvrr offering remittance services to oversea workers in Hong Kong. As the fintech lending in China picked up, Silvrr pivoted into instalment for electronics and chose Indonesia as its market. Of course, the name also needed to be changed, to very nicely local sounding Akulaku.
As a Chinese company, Akulaku is seen by many as a disruptor in Indonesia’s nascent fintech lending space. Its tactics were aggressive and it obtained a multifinance licence through acquisition.
It grew fast. Of course for any fintech lending company to sustain fast growth, it needs lending capital, which explains why Akulaku needed to not only raise more and more rounds of funding, but also plug in many other sources of leverage.
Will Akulaku prevail?
Momentum Works is of the opinion that in comparison, its main rival (if it considers co), Kredivo, is more prudent in its tactics (and thus grew more slowly in comparison).
Only time will tell which model will prevail, but our take is that the two will converge, and whichever company that adapts faster will own a bigger share of the market.
And the market is big enough for multiple players to thrive – in China a number of credit instalment companies are publicly listed. However, in terms of scale, most of them pale in front of Huabei & Jiebei, virtual credit and micro-cash loan products offered by Ant Financial.
Ant investments
Talking about Ant Financial, Momentum Works believes that their strategy in Southeast Asia is taking shape. Alipay is accepted across tourist spots in multiple countries; Lazada’s Hellopay has been taken over by Alipay; and it has invested in or built JVs on e-wallet companies in multiple countries.
In addition, using the usual Alibaba tactic, it also scans through the market to see which player that has a potential in any of the consumer fintech sectors, and makes investment into them. We are talking about Mdaq, BluePay, now Akulaku, and probably more to come.
