Payment Business

Payment gateway Xendit is paving the way to empower digital infrastructure in Indonesia.

- Marella Putri

In August 2018, McKinsey projected that online commerce market in Indonesia would grow by up to eightfold from 2017–2022, from $8 billion to $65 billion, contributing 2–3% to the nation’s GDP. At the same time, while consumer payment services such as e-wallets have been growing in the country (mostly in big cities), there are fewer players that can ensure “seamless, secure, and scalable payment opportunities” among businesses. Indonesia-based payment gateway Xendit is looking to change this.

“We tried to build different apps, different services all the time, and what we found was there was no payment business that could provide payment of the quality and at the speed that we wanted. So, we said ‘If no one can build it, then we’ll just build it for the country’. And I think that’s what excited us about building the payment infrastructure business,” says Moses Lo, cofounder and CEO of Xendit (PT Sinar Digital Terdepan), who was named as one of Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 in 2016.

Xendit was founded by Bo Chen, Juan Gonzalez, Moses Lo, and Tessa Wijaya in 2015. The team also paved the way for the Indonesian startup scene by becoming the first startup from Indonesia to graduate from Y Combinator—a renowned Silicon Valley incubator that has funded major companies like Airbnb and Dropbox. Xendit first examined consumer habits in Indonesia and tapped into peer-to-peer payments, with particular regard to the country’s huge market and developing technology, but low credit card penetration. The company’s early customers loved how it solved their problems, helped their businesses to easily accept and disburse payments in a faster and more reliable way. The demand gave Xendit the idea of serving as a payment gateway company in Indonesia, steering Xendit’s business from B2C to B2B.