Cermati Builds the Foundation of Becoming the Best Fintech Startup in Indonesia

Financial portal Cermati.com announced a funding from East Ventures and BEENOS Plaza yesterday (9/7). The investment was made undisclosed, although the team claimed that they’ll grow a bigger and stronger team as well as enrich their products.

Big yet infant market

One of Cermati’s founders, Oby Sumampouw, admitted that the market and potential is still open wide. He described the data by McKinsey Personal Financial Survey stating that Indonesians’ ownership of financial products per capita is at 2.3, while neighboring countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore possessed better figure with 2.5, 5.4, and 7.7 respectively.

The fact is that the economic condiiton of Indonesians has been much better now, resulting on the increasing purchasing power as well. McKinsey noted that the citizens’ loan rate reached $120 billion, while the total saving they booked was only 30% of the total GDP. 60%o of adults didn’t even own any saving account. This encouraged Cermati to join the field and present the best solution for the people to do their research, comparing financial products and choose the best one online.

“It’s a bit cliche, but my intention of coming home to Indonesia [to start Cermati] was to contribute to the nation’s growth,” said Sumampouw whose programming career has been quite a hit in U.S.

Crown jewel from the U.S

In the country, Sumampouw had established his own career at a number of tech-based companies in Silicon Valley. His past four years were spent at LinkedIn, lending his hands to grow LinkedIn News and LinkedIn Infrastructure. He also previously worked at Google and Oracle.

Andhy Koesnandar, another Cermati’s Co-Founder, also learned and had his career spent in the U.S. While Sumampouw graduated from Stanford University, Koesnandar finished his education at University of Washington and University of Nebraska. He enriched his skills set at Microsoft, working as the company’s Head of Software Engineering for seven years. His portfolio includes component project at Bing.coms, Cortana, MSN Travel, Windows Azure, and Microsoft Dynamics.

Being the best financial product information portal there is in Indonesia

Both founders decided to rebuild Cermati back in December 2014. Since then, they claimed that the team have gathered no less than 270 credit card products, loan, and other financial products.

“The ideal demography for our market is tech-savvy people aged between 20 and 40 years old who are after financial success. [...] We’ll focus on credit card products and personal loan in the meantime,” told Sumampouw during an interview session.

Combining insight it gains from BEENOS Plaza in financial sector with the experience of its founders, Cermati will fully serve Indonesian citizens effectively online, unless is an offline action is required.

Cermati’s presence will bring the crowd in financial products comparison site vertical. A direct competition to the startup will surely come from earlier players like HaloMoney, CekAja and AturDuit.