Telkomsel, XL, Indosat Forms Strategic Alliance For Digital Mobile Payments

Indonesia's top 3 carriers (Telkomsel, XL, Indosat) today announced strategic partnership involving their electronic money transfer platform. XL Tunai, Dompetku Indosat and Telkomsel TCash announced their integrated partnership that will enable consumer to send money via SMS throughout the 3 networks.

In an announcement today, Director of Indonesia's central bank Darmin Nasution said that this strategic partnership will help push the digital payment adoption throughout the country, and to support government's program for cashless society. With this partnership, 230 million users will be enabled to send money using the integrated platform, combining XL's, Telkomsel's and Indosat's subscription number. TCash customers can send money to XL Tunai customers or Dompetku and vice versa.

So far, a few companies are trying to tackle the digital payment issue in Indonesia and has been pushing hard for regulations as well as consumer education. Although mostly still focuses on bank-based payments (credit/debit card) but local telco carriers already realise the significance of digital micropayment in Indonesia.

Companies such as Coda Payments has been pushing its effort by partnering with Axis, but the move has always been dispersed by exclusivity. Telcos never partner with each other and tried to keep the revenue inside their own platform, and now the wall has been torn down by this partnership. Hey, together might not always mean better, but this partnership show the maturity level taken by telco companies in order to grow together and grow the market as well as the industry.

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