Who are leading digital wallets in Indonesia?

For those who are in Indonesia, especially if you reside in urban areas, a digital wallet is a must-have item. From food delivery, online shopping, paying insurance, to purchasing food in nearby warung, it can be done with these digital wallets apps.

In general, there are 2 types of digital wallets: an independent app and embedded within a bigger ecosystem. In our full Blooming Ecommerce in Indonesia Part 2.1: Ecosystem – Payment report, we evaluated the main players based on two categories – embedded app or independent app.

Embedded payments apps (e.g. ShopeePay and GoPay) have strong incentives coming from the parent apps. The parent apps (Shopee and Gojek) have been able to attract high traffic especially during the pandemic, where people shop online and order food more frequently than before. This in turn benefits the volume of the embedded payment apps more.

On the other side, independent apps have more flexibility to expand their products (i.e OVO doing OVO invest), allowing the players to focus more on providing various financial services to their customers.

This led us to the million dollar question – who is leading the digital payments in Indonesia?

Some market research companies have done the survey to see which players are the most popular among Indonesians. 

We feel that surveys alone do not capture the full picture for products in an industry that is changing very fast, and should be used with caution. 

Another way to assess usage is by the actual usage gauged via monthly active users.  

In the independent app category. OVO is leading the monthly active users with 20.8 million, followed by Dana and LinkAja.

OVO leads as most people use it to have transactions in Grab and Tokopedia.

And recently, they launched a partnership with Bareksa for OVO Invest, a feature for OVO users to buy mutual funds and to monitor its price movements inside the OVO mobile application.

They are also in partnership with Prudential for its health and life insurance product. The timing is very good as need for insurance rises due to the pandemic.  This is a good initiative to capture more younger Indonesian users who are getting more financial literacy these days.

In the embedded e-wallet category, ShopeePay leads with more than 10 million paying users among 51.5 million Shopee’s monthly active users.

The free shipping campaign from Shopee works well to push the adoption of ShopeePay for its users and its intention to convert their ecommerce users into their wallet users is still going strong.

In addition, Shopee has been aggressively expanding to offline use case to tier 3 city and beyond: 

Amid being the first mover in the payment space, GoPay only comes second in the embedded e-wallet app. However, with the recent Gojek-Tokopedia merger, we might see more dynamics in e-wallet and payment spaces in the future.

This is just one of the many interesting tidbits in our reports. You can find more details in our reports. We welcome any comments, suggestions, and questions.