Indonesia’s financial industry is in the midst of rapid digitalization. Digitalization of financial services has the potential of improving Indonesia's financial inclusion among the majority of Indonesia's unbanked and underbanked population. To achieve this, banks and fintech need to collaborate closely with one another and grow the ecosystem together.

Ayoconnect’s CEO and Founder Jakob Rost along with MNC Bank’s COO Teddy Tee, BRI Agroniaga’s Chief of Digital Banking Bhimo Wikan Hantoro, and Jenius BTPN’s Head of Digital Banking Irwan Tisnabudi shared a stage on the second day of Wild Digital Indonesia to have a discussion on the future of Indonesia’s digital bank ecosystem.

"The rapid growth of digital transformation in Indonesia happened because banks and fintech are growing at the same time with customers' financial literacy across all socio-demographic profiles. Moving forward, I believe that more underbanked societies and state-owned enterprises will continue to seek solutions that could fulfill their demand,”  said Bhimo Wikan Hantoro, BRI Agroniaga’s Chief of Digital Banking.

"The emergence of fintech creates a new payment ecosystem. It triggers traditional banks to quickly realize that people nowadays don't need banks; they need banking. That being said, I believe that collaborations between banks and fintechs are more important than ever. Building a digital bank is not an easy journey, so I believe the collaborative trend will result in solutions designed to solve the right cases and particular needs,” added  Irwan Tisnabudi, Jenius BTPN’s Head of Digital Banking.

MNC Bank’s COO Teddy Tee particularly highlights the momentum of collaboration between the stakeholders. "Digital banking provides an opportunity for you serve to your customers better. The next challenge would be how to hyperspeed this transformation by improving financial inclusion in Indonesia. Banks, fintechs, and other financial institutions need to formulate a strategy to accelerate the growth of digital ecosystem. Fintech has more flexibility and agility in terms of distribution while banks have sustainable capital and resources, therefore, collaboration would benefit each other to sustain one another," he said.

A collaboration between banks and fintechs could be enabled through API integrations. APIs (Application Programming Interface) is software intermediaries which allow two applications or institutions, such as a fintech and a bank, to talk to each other. For example, Ayoconnect's API platform enables developers to choose from a wide range of financial white-label products on Ayoconnect’s API platform and quickly launch them to their users.

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Founded in 2016, Ayoconnect’s API stack has seen rapid adoption. It is trusted by more than 100+ Indonesian companies as clients, including leading banks, retailers, e-commerce, fintechs, and e-wallets such as Bank BRI, Bank Mandiri, DANA, Indomaret, Bukalapak, Home Credit, Pegadaian and connects more than 1,000 institutions through its network of APIs. Ayoconnect’s APIs process more than 300 million API hits annually.

For more information on Ayoconnect’s API-driven solutions, please contact us at partnership@ayoconnect.id.