Pegadaian's Transformation Strategy in the Era of Financial Disruption

As one of the oldest businesses in Indonesia, pawn services have helped mid to low-class economies in getting fast loans without high interest.

However, in recent years, the role of financial industry players in Indonesia has shifted by the presence of fintech. Not only banking, fintech also disrupted the pawn business because access to loans can now be obtained easily and quickly.

This situation encouraged Pegadaian to start initiating transformation in enhancing its role in the digital financial ecosystem. Moreover, Pegadaian is a top of mind company in the pawn sector that controls 90 percent share with more than 4,000 total outlets in Indonesia.

Pegadaian business transformation

Pegadaian begins with innovations to digitize its services through the Pegadaian Digital Service (PDS) platform in April 2018. Then, Pegadaian is yet to have a digital roadmap and a special division in charge of the development of corporate innovation.

In its journey, Pegadaian then decided to set the Company's Long Term Plan (RJPP) for the 2019-2023 period as a foundation for transformation that focused on four things including (1) business model, (2) operational, (3) channel marketing, and (4) segment market.

In short, this state-owned company wants to transform its position in the market, not only as a pawnshop, but also a company that offers other financial services. It was proven by Pegadaian service expansion to the gold sector.

In terms of operational business, Pegadaian utilizes digital technology to analyze potential customer's profiles. In addition, the company has transformed sales channels to digital and played into a wider market segment, namely the upper-middle segment.

In the progress, Pegadaian formed the Transformation Office (TO) division in 2019. Pegadaian's VP of Digital Business Development & Partnership Herdi Sularko said the three roles, exploring new business models, updating business processes, and updating work culture in the scope of the organization to be more agile in developing products/services.

"Digital is evolving and we have to start practicing [adapting] because every day there is always something new. Problems in corporations are only communication between departments or divisions. Therefore, we must be nimble and agile. Our focus is not on startups, but rather shaping the culture of 'our work and that of others can align'," Herdi said as quoted in the Corporate Digital Transformation Report 2020.

Digital product development

As previously mentioned, Pegadaian seeks to reach a wider market. This strategy was later answered by developing Pegadaian Digital Service (PDS) which offered a number of services, such as Pawn Online and Gold Trading.

To date, Pegadaian has three main businesses including pawning, financing, and gold investment. As much as 90 percent of Pegadaian's income comes from pawn services. Based on company data, as many as 2 million customers out of a total of 13.86 million customers in 2019 have now made digital transactions through PDS.

To boost the number of customers, Pegadaian has just commercialized the Pickup & Delivery Service feature for Pawn Online services in the Jakarta area. Pegadaian cooperates with Gojek as a logistics partner for Gadai Online through the GoSend service.

Previously, Pegadaian had introduced this service - originally called Gadai on Demand - in April last year. At that time, Gadai on Demand was limited to trials at several points in Jakarta.

Recently reached by DailySocial team, Herdi revealed that the availability of the shuttle service for Gadai Online will follow the readiness of Pegadaian outlets and the scope of logistics partner services in other regions in Indonesia. "This cooperation is for the last mile logistics. Therefore, we pick up the ball by cooperating with Gojek through the GoSend service," he said.

Online Pawn Service in the PDS application allows customers to send pawned goods with GoSend. Customers can pawn the goods without the need to come to the outlet and send it to the nearest Pegadaian outlet (7km radius) from their location.

Similar to the GoSend order process in general, the courier will pick up the collateral to the customer's location. They also can still monitor (tracking) the journey of the courier to the destination location. In addition, customers can still communicate with PDS couriers and staff via chat.

Furthermore, he also plans to present the GoPay service as a payment option for Pickup & Delivery Service. In addition, Pegadaian also plans to test the use of the Dropbox platform to pass the price of photo-based collateral items sent by customers.

"Currently, we cannot go to GoPay, but this has been included in our development roadmap going forward. GoPay is needed for payment of trips to outlets. Going forward, we want to centralize digital products in PDS applications," he explained.

Collaboration and outlet transformation

In addition to digitizing services, Pegadaian also made a breakthrough by building an Open API infrastructure to enter the financial ecosystem in Indonesia. Herdi said, collaboration with many partners has the opportunity to create new ecosystems and income lines.

"There has been a disruption. All banks start towards the open banking platform. The problem is, the pawnshop industry does not have a benchmark because our position is between banking and other financial industries. Indeed, this business is not affected but we can see a business model that can be scaled up, "he explained.

One of Pegadaian's big collaborations is to hook Tokopedia in providing Online Gold Sale and Purchase services, which launched in January 2019. This collaboration is claimed to be a success by the company considering the integration process only takes two months and has positive traction from Tokopedia users.

Moreover, Pegadaian is to modify some outlets to be relevant to current market demand. Pegadaian has transformed 31 of its outlets into The Gade Coffee & Gold for more than 4,000 outlets in Indonesia.

Herdi said, the company has been applied the agile organization concept and CI / CD framework (Continuous Integration / Continuous Development), each product will continue to be developed with user experience as the top priority. "We want to provide the same customer experience as offline. Present anywhere with easy and agile services for all people," he explained.

Meanwhile, in terms of back-end and ground-level operations, Pegadaian also implements technology solutions, such as IoT-based RFID networks and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to improve the security of collateral and operational efficiency.

– Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian