In South-East Asia, Grab and Gojek bring banking to the masses

BOTH WERE founded by Harvard Business School graduates, from the same year. Both have apps that have been downloaded more than 100m times. Both started with ride-hailing and expanded into other logistics businesses, such as deliveries and food-ordering. The story of two South-East Asian “deca-unicorns”—fintechs valued above $10bn—is usually told in terms of their rivalry. This report is more concerned with how ride-hailing services can bring banking to the masses in a largely unbanked region.

The older is Gojek (the name comes from ojek, the Indonesian word for a motorcycle taxi). Founded in 2010, it expanded beyond Indonesia only in 2018. It is now also active in Vietnam and Thailand, and in January entered Singapore, its rival’s current base.

Grab, founded in Malaysia in 2012, went multinational earlier. Last year it pulled ahead of Gojek when Uber called time on a price war with Grab, took a 27.5% stake in its erstwhile rival and left the region. It is now active in the same four countries as Gojek, plus Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and the Philippines. Gojek’s main edge in what is now a two-way fight is that it is native to Indonesia, which, at 265m, accounts for two-fifths of the region’s population.

At first, the pair’s apps simply put customers and drivers in touch, with payment in...

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