Singapore’s MoneySmart heads to Indonesia with acquisition of regional counterpart

Singapore-based personal finance portal MoneySmart today announced its entry into Indonesia with the acquisition of its regional counterpart KreditAja. The acquisition was a full equity deal, with the latter taking a minority stake in MoneySmart.

Since it was founded a year ago, KreditAja’s 11-man team has seen north of a million visitors, which will now be added to MoneySmart’s half a million monthly visitors. MoneySmart CEO Vinod Nair reveals that MoneySmart has a current annual revenue of over S$1 million (US$800,000).

With regards to both traffic and revenue, he adds that both figures have “almost tripled” since MoneySmart’s last funding round in 2013, when it raised S$589,000 (US$471,000) from Golden Gate Ventures and NRF.

Both parties have partnerships with major financial institutions in the region. KreditAja also currently powers Indonesia ecommerce marketplace Berniaga’s auto loan comparison feature, and has a number of similarly sized partnerships in the pipeline for early 2015, according to a statement.

“MoneySmart is already a well-known brand in Singapore, and bringing the two businesses together gives us a fantastic platform to move forward quickly with our development plans in Indonesia,” says KreditAja CEO Rob Barnes.

Nair tells Tech in Asia that KreditAja will be centrally managed by a combined management team based in Singapore. Moving in 2015, both teams will be growing their product coverage, with an emphasis on insurance products.

See: DrWealth bags $640,000, aims to have an account for every household in Singapore