Season 2 - Ep. 5 | Leadership for Good: FinTech Transformation in Asia with Aldi Haryopratomo, Board of Commissioners of eFishery; Board of Advisors of Halodoc ID; and Former CEO of GoPay

Entrepreneur and mentor Aldi Haryopratomo opts for the road less travelled—figuratively but, early in his career, also literally on a motorbike. It’s Aldi’s ability to see opportunity from unique perspectives that allowed him to, among other successes, effect financial inclusion across Southeast Asia.

Aldi is the former CEO of GoPay, former CEO and Co-founder of Mapan, and is currently on the Board of Commissioners for eFishery and the Board of Advisors for Halodoc in Indonesia. Nowadays, he’s on sabbatical and engaged in his biggest role yet: fun dad.

Here’s a taste of what you’ll hear from Aldi in this episode, in his words (edited for length and clarity):

Aldi’s Redefiner Moment: On community-based FinTech
I think the key to any FinTech product, or anything that I design actually, is to use the cultural cues for that country and then use technology to make them more efficient.

I wanted my first company, Mapan, to be based in this community spirit. We started with the basics: bill payment with the help of the woman in the village who is like the community advisor or influencer, whom people trust with their money. We scaled up very quickly and became one of the largest bill payment companies in Indonesia.

But there was still more to learn. She told me that every Eid (which is like our Christmas) the women in the village have to take turns cooking their curry because they can’t afford to buy their own pot. That means the person who cooks first has seven day old curry! What’s more, she actually ends up spending more: the pot is like $30, but she can only afford to pay $10 at a time, so instead she pays $10 a month for six months and actually spends a lot more than the price of the pot.

We learned about a rotating savings group in the next village. Five women will put in $5 a month and each month, one of them wins their own pot in a raffle. Eventually each of the five gets a pot. I thought, wait, this is brilliant. This is a unique model. I’ll buy the pots and instead of lending money, I’ll give them the pot. I was literally a traveling pot salesman!

We started selling these “white goods” through the rotating savings group. Think Sears in America. But instead of using credit cards, we were using a credit system that was already in the community called arisan. It’s a very good way to finance the low-income population because it’s in between savings and credit, and prevents people from taking credit they can’t afford to pay. We went from village to village and ended up with 3 million members, making us the world’s largest rotating savings group collective.

On taking professional risks
In December 2017 we combined Mapan with Kartuku and Midtrans, two other FinTech companies in Indonesia offering offline and online payment services. It was scary because it was such a big bet. The safer bet would've been to just continue growing Mapan. We had a good customer base.

Had we each continued separately, we would all have grown, but we would not have been able to provide the services we do now. We have been able to lower the cost for merchants in Indonesia to enter the financial system by replacing costly devices with QR codes. We ended up growing 1,000 fold in a year, exceeding 1 million transactions a day.

On mentorship and paying it forward
One thing I’ve learned about mentors is that you get lucky. Professor Muhammad Yunus, my hero, invested in my company. He also sent Abdul Matin, who was a CEO of Grameen Turkey, to teach me how to run our organization, how to build a culture. He was able to show us that you can be both community focused, but also rigorous in operation. And that was important.

I mentored my childhood friend Jonathan with his company Halodoc, which became the largest telemedicine company in Indonesia. I wasn't in the driver's seat, but I was with him watching that company grow. I think I probably learned more than he did. As an entrepreneur, mentoring somebody else in another industry actually helps you because you will learn whether your solution works or not in a different context.

On what’s next
I’m actually in the middle of looking for that next industry, where I can build an ecosystem together with a group of friends and companies that want to change the landscape for the better. I think talent is more important than capital. So it is absolutely imperative that the world's smartest people work on the world's most important problems. We can't wait.

Aldi Haryopratomo
Board of Commissioners of eFishery; Board of Advisors of Halodoc ID; and Former CEO of GoPay

Aldi Haryopratomo is an entrepreneur and advisor. He is a member of the Board of Commissioners for eFisheries and the Board of Advisors for Halodoc.

This journey started when Aldi joined as an early employee of Kiva.org, one of the worlds first peer to peer lending company which provides entrepreneurs in developing countries access to loans through the internet. While in Kiva Aldi traveled across rural Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam in search of microfinance banks which are credible and willing to post their borrower's profiles on Kiva. He then continued the mission at BCG, where he was able to focus on telco and financial services, including a project building the plan for a mobile banking service.

After BCG, Aldi founded Mapan, which has recruited three million members as part of a rotating group savings and loans program in Indonesia. Mapan was acquired by Gojek in 2017 and continues to provide access to goods and financial services to low income communities in Indonesia. When he first joined Gojek, almost all of Gopay's transactions were for Gojek Services. Today, Gopay processes billions of dollars of transactions outside of Gojek, serves hundreds of thousands of Merchants. and is present in Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines (through its subsidiary, Coins.ph).

He graduated with Distinction from Purdue University's Computer Engineering program and has an MBA from Harvard Business School.