The key players in Indonesia’s credit-scoring space

It’s no secret that Indonesia’s sizable underbanked population makes it fertile ground for the fintech industry. But even as firms big and small aim to revolutionize lending, one of its most basic tasks – analyzing whether borrowers can pay back their loans – continues to be a challenge.

Yohanes Arts Abimanyu, president director of the Pefindo Credit Bureau (IdScore), notes that conventional Indonesian banks typically use data from Otoritas Jasa Keuangan (OJK), the country’s financial services authority. But that may be insufficient to assess the creditworthiness of 92 million adults who have never participated in financial services.

To answer that demand, a crop of startups has risen in the past few years, mostly focusing on analyzing alternative data. These primarily refer to digital traces such as telecom data, e-wallet payments, ecommerce transactions, and ride-hailing info, according to Mohan Jayaraman, a managing director at global information services company Experian Asia Pacific.

Jayaraman’s firm has its own credit-scoring system called Experian PowerScore, which uses data from multiple sources including telecom providers, consumer services, and ecommerce players.

IdScore, meanwhile, has teamed up with local telco Indosat Ooredoo to launch a credit-scoring product called IdTelcoScore. The company also has a personal credit-checking platform called MyIdScore, which has been integrated with OJK’s Sistem Layanan Informasi Keuangan (SLIK).

Emerging market

While many players in this space are local, some of the bigger ones are foreign entrants from more mature fintech markets like China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

OJK has classified these so-called “innovative credit-scoring companies” into a special cluster. The majority of these companies operate in the business-to-business segment, while a small number of them offer credit-scoring directly to end consumers.

Here are the credit-scoring companies and their funding details:

Some ecommerce companies are also riding the wave. Tokopedia has its own credit-scoring platform called Semangat Digital Bangsa (SDB), which has launched Toko Score to help analyze customer risk profiles through activities and transactions on the ecommerce platform. Herman Widjaja, Tokopedia’s chief technology officer, has led SDB since 2019.

Data protection concerns