Flip Gets Series B+ Funding Worth 811 Billion Rupiah

Flip announced the acquisition of additional funding for its series B round worth $55 million or equivalent to IDR 811 billion. This time, Tencent took the lead in funding, followed by Block (formerly Square) and Insight Partners.

A number of angel investors were involved, including Guillaume Pousaz (CEO of Checkout.com); Gokul Rajaram (Doordash executive and commissioner of Coinbase, Pinterest), and Michael Vaughan (ex-COO Venmo).

The new investment builds on the series B acquisition that Flip announced late in 2021, valued at $48 million, led by Sequoia Capital India, Insight Partners and Insignia Venture Partners.

According to our sources, the total equity funds that have been obtained by this startup have reached $120 million or equivalent to 1.7 trillion Rupiah.

This additional capital will be focused on strengthening the team, particularly in the technical and product divisions. Currently, Flip has more than 400 employees. This is done to accelerate the development of new products and technologies.

Flip COO Gita Prihanto said that as of May 2022 they have served more than 10 million users, an increase from the previous 7 million in December 2021.

Their main service helps users make interbank transfers, top-ups, and remittances. On the other hand, their B2B services are also growing rapidly.

Flip B2B has been used by hundreds of companies to help process employee payroll, customer refunds, invoice payments, and remittances. In total each year they record transactions of up to $ 12 billion.

Interbank Transfer Service

Flip is here to address issues related to interbank transfer fees which are quite expensive — especially felt by the lower middle class and MSME players. Flip technology is able to be a “forwarder”.

For example, a user from bank A wants to transfer to bank B, then he can first transfer to Flip’s bank account A and then forward it to bank B’s destination account of the prospective beneficiary by Flip’s bank account B automatically.

The concept is well received by the people of Indonesia. Moreover, Flip’s business model is freemium, to a certain extent users can use the service for free. Other players are also starting to present this service as one of the superior features.

For example, carried out by the DANA e-money platform, the service had established them in the highest ranking for similar platforms. As of December 2021, there were more than 350 million transactions using the “Send Money” feature in DANA, an average of 30 million transactions per month.

A similar strategy is now being applied by many fintechs, including digital banking platforms that have recently emerged. On the other hand, Bank Indonesia has also released BI Fast Payment (BI-FAST), reducing interbank transfer fees to IDR 2,500.

Responding to this, Co-founder and CEO of Flip Rafi Putra Arriyan said that his party always welcomes the policies made by Bank Indonesia because they are in line with Flip’s vision of presenting fair financial technology solutions for all people in Indonesia.

Flip for Business Features

The obstacle that is often faced when transferring funds conventionally is the speed of receiving funds which is not real-time. With an SKN (National Clearing System) transfer, it will take about 2-3 working days for the funds to reach the destination account.

Likewise, if the interbank transfer is made at the end of the month, there will be a delay of one working day due to the book closing process.

In addition, there are certain fees when transferring funds with the conventional system. For real-time online transfers between banks, the cost range is IDR 6500 or IDR 2500 with BI Fast.

However, considering the implementation of BI Fast is still limited, if a company makes a large volume of fund transfer transactions, this transfer fee will certainly lead to higher operational costs.

To provide ease and efficiency of fund transfers for business owners, Flip for Business comes with a Money Transfer solution. The Money Transfer feature operates a no-code dashboard and API integration service so that fund transfers to multiple accounts are faster, even in minutes.