Indonesia’s Payfazz Raises $53M In New Round

Indonesian payment processor Payfazz has secured $53 million in Series B funding, numerous media outlets reported Monday (July 6).

Jakarta-based Payfazz operates through agents — the company’s network consisted of more than a quarter million — who process payments to pay utility bills, buy telephone time and add to mobile wallets, Tech in Asia reported.

Indonesia has a huge economy and a population of about 268 million, but many of those people live in rural areas where traditional banking services are hard to come by.

That void has drawn a number of new offerings. In one, Indonesia-based travel and lifestyle platform Traveloka partnered with Bank BRI on a credit card for Indonesia’s underbanked population, as PYMNTS reported last fall.

In just the past few years, the percentage of adults with bank accounts increased dramatically, according to a 2017 World Bank report — the most recent available. According to that report, 49 percent of Indonesia residents ages 15 or older had bank accounts in 2017, up from 36 percent in 2014. About 93 percent of U.S. residents in the same age group have bank accounts.

“Our agents are small businesses and people who have lots of traffic from rural areas’ populations in their places,” Payfazz Co-Founder Hendra Kwik said, as quoted in a TechCrunch report. “It can be warung and kirana stores, telco stores, small restaurants or even someone’s house. They are the perfect profile to become our agents because they’re ubiquitously distributed and have high coverage in rural areas.”

Investors in the Payfazz Series B round are Y Combinator, Tiger Global Management, Quiet Capital, Insignia Venture Partners, BRI Ventures B Capital Group and ACE & Co., according to a Crunchbase report, which noted the startup’s Series A round was in November 2018.

TechCrunch reported that the Series A round totaled $21 million and included some of the same investors who returned for the Series B funding announced Monday.