Ovo & the Indonesian digital payment market – sales strategies & operations

Ovo: e-payments, partnerships and pitching strategies.

Created by Lippo Group, Ovo was intended to act as a loyalty programme, payment function and financial service benefit all rolled into one. Later, it formed partnerships with Grab, a transport and courier firm, and e-commerce company Tokopedia – expanding its reach even further to become a leading digital payment in Indonesia.

The specialist discussed Ovo’s market reach: it has several million monthly active customers, each using the app a few times per month. Lippo Group’s malls take up about a third of modern retail space, and about a fifth of payments in these shopping centres at key food and beverage merchants are made via Ovo. What’s more, Ovo has been agreed as the preferred e-payment method; “the tenants inside the malls can accept other payments, but our competitors cannot advertise, cannot promote the programmes or availability of their payment inside the mall.” 

How Ovo chooses new markets was outlined, from mapping key cities to final quality control checks after installing its systems. The sales strategy was detailed, too; pitches to larger and smaller enterprises are generally the same, but there are some differences for the latter. Among other aspects, “we’re basically telling them, ‘We have an app. In that app it helps you to start tracking your purchases, your selling and then you can see total business that you have on a monthly basis.’” Marketing is an added bonus, which “is being appreciated hugely by these mom-and-pop stores, because they never got exposure through this debit card or credit card, so no-one has addressed their marketing needs.”

To access all the human insights from Third Bridge Forum’s Ovo & the Indonesian Digital Payment Market – Sales Strategies & Operations Interview, click here to view the full transcript.