Pandemic Creates Opportunity for Youtap to Accelerate Digitization in Traditional Retails

After officially launched last February, Youtap's e-money processing platform and point-of-sales platform were hit by the fact that pandemic makes it difficult for SME owners to run their business. In order to solve this problem, the Youtap team jumped into the market and met target users to launch a campaign on the importance of using cashless and touchless system.

Through the campaign, YouTap claims to be able to increase adoption to 300%. Youtap Indonesia's CEO, Herman Suharto said the company has been always consistent with the vision to be present at every level of business in helping and empowering business actors to get the best achievements.

"We present appropriate technology that can help businesses obtain comprehensive digital business solutions in just one application. We are sure that the Youtap Trade Application will make our merchant partners, especially SMEs, be more productive in developing their business," he said.

Youtap currently has 50 thousand merchant partners and has processed around 1 million transactions. The target is, Youtap can acquire around 1 million merchants throughout Indonesia by the end of 2020. They also plan to expand their partnerships with financial services to big brands like McDonald's and others.

"Big brands such as McDonald's have also experienced our services during the pandemic. We have succeeded in increasing their sales by implementing e-vocabulary which facilitates the purchase and payment process at outlets," Herman said.

Regarding the competitive landscape, Youtap is dealing with many players. For example LinkAja, currently, they are helping to optimize the distribution of services for market and hawkers. Other applications, such as Dana, are also maneuvering to rely on QRIS, which is currently being intensified its penetration. In terms of POS, Indonesia already has several services, starting from Moka and Nadipos which already involved in Gojek group, also Qasir, Pawoon, and others.

Regarding financial records, recently new startups have also appeared, for example, BukuWarung and BukuKas. Both of them have secured pre-series A funding to expand their business throughout Indonesia, targeting micro retailers.

Conventional retail digitization will also take a long time. It must be comprehensive and form an ecosystem, which means not only from the merchant side to be facilitated but also from the side of the consumer. Meanwhile, the trend in the e-money service adoption among the public continues to increase. The thing is, there are more and more players with very tight competition.

Merchant-centric app

Claiming as more than an ordinary cashier platform, Youtap in Indonesia comes from a joint venture between the Salim Group and Youtap Global, a technology company from New Zealand. Through the application, all UKM owners can easily make financial reports, collect data, and even personalize notification features.

"This notification works similarly to a chat app like WhatsApp. Every morning we remind the number of sales from stalls or business owners so they can be more enthusiastic about running a business every day," Head of Product Development Youtapm, M. Syaiful Anam said.

Although the Basic option can be accessed for free, users who want to enjoy various additional features and special tools can choose how to subscribe. In addition to making the process easier and faster, Youtap also continues to receive input from merchants, related to new features or tools that merchants want and of course need. Starting from home delivery to the process of promoting digitally to a wider target customer.

"We have already realized one of the feedbacks, and we plan to launch a new feature in the next month that can be useful for merchants during this pandemic," Syaiful said.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian