PingPong Scores Payments License in Indonesia

Enterprise-focused cross-border payments platform PingPong has won approval to do business in Indonesia.

Bank Indonesia, the country’s central bank, has granted the company a payment system service provider license, allowing it to facilitate domestic and cross-border payments in the world’s fourth most populous country, PingPong said Wednesday (July 31).

“As one of the largest and fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia, Indonesia offers an incredible opportunity for enterprises scaling their operations globally,” David Messenger, CEO of global businesses at PingPong, said in a news release. “This license enables us to expand our reach and provide enterprises with end-to-end, one-stop cross-border payment solutions.”

Indonesia, the release noted, has a significant consumer market, with its gross domestic product expected to hit $1.5 trillion this year. The country’s young population and large labor force have made it one of the fastest growing nations in Southeast Asia, and an increasingly crucial country for companies that want to expand their global footprint, PingPong said.

“For businesses focussing on international trade, this license will help them expand and gain access to the region’s $320 billion export market,” the company said.

PingPong already holds more than 60 payment licenses and permits around the world, including in the United States, EU, U.K., Hong Kong and mainland China.

In other news from the cross-border payments space, PYMNTS discussed the importance of lowering the cost of these payments last week in an interview with Ram Sundaram, COO at TerraPay, during a discussion for the series “What’s Next in Payments: The Halftime Report.”

The World Bank’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for a reduction in the cost of cross-border remittances, which now stands at around 8%, underlining the importance of cost reduction as an innovation pillar within the payments field.

Sundaram said that his company’s mission is in line with this goal, aiming to reduce these costs further to allow for low-value transactions with prohibitive fees. These lower costs can unlock new use cases for cross-border services, he added, thus expanding revenue streams for financial institutions and service providers.

“If you do a $10 transaction today, you’ll probably spend a very significant part of that $10 as fees,” Sundaram said. “And we need to get to a point where that base fee is something that you don’t have to think about, so that you can do low-value transactions at scale — that could change the landscape of cross-border payments and remittances.”