The combination of Gojek and Tokopedia, two leading Indonesian platforms, is no surprise.
It has been telegraphed for a while and became a necessity once Grab – Gojek’s closest equivalent in southeast Asia – opted out of a merger with its Indonesian counterpart and instead opted to boost its capital through a special purpose acquisition company (Spac) listing.
The new business, to be called GoTo Group, has a lot going for it.
In combination, its legacy businesses had gross transaction value of more than $22 billion through 1.8 billion transactions in 2020, with 11 million merchant partners and 100 million monthly active users supported by a registered driver fleet of two million.
Gojek is Indonesia’s leading ride-hailing, mobile services and payments platform, and an important fixture more widely in southeast Asia; Tokopedia is a tech-smart e-commerce company – toko means shop in Bahasa.
Between them their investor base includes Alibaba, BlackRock, Facebook, Google, KKR, PayPal, Temasek, Tencent and SoftBank; powerful friends, indeed.
Whatever the outcome, the new payments business … will be well-placed in one of the world’s most compelling markets
At Euromoney, our interest in these platforms is always on the financial services side: the way groups such as Gojek and Grab – and Alibaba, Tencent and Paytm – use their e-commerce or mobile chat footprints to underpin nimble and powerful payments businesses that displace the mainstream operations of retail banks.
And
