What does it mean to launch a credit card in Indonesia?
Here’s one perspective: it involves navigating a complex mix of religious and cultural nuances, unfamiliar regulations, limited credit histories, and the lure of predatory high-interest lending.
Indonesia, with its population of nearly 280 million, includes more than 80 million wage earners, 55 million of whom are enrolled in social security. Yet credit card penetration remains below 3%, largely concentrated among a small, banked elite. That leaves the vast majority of the population outside the formal credit system.
Local banks in Indonesia often rely on traditional, collateral-based lending models. Their technology infrastructure and credit risk tools are limited, which contributes to strict requirements for unsecured credit. Chinese companies entering the market typically bring strong tech capabilities but often prioritize short-term loan products. Singaporean and Indian entrants tend to promote buy now, pay later models.
The core challenge is structural. Without robust digital risk systems, banks limit unsecured credit to pre-vetted individuals with significant assets or lending history. The prevailing assumption in Southeast Asia is that this is an untapped fintech market, but it’s more accurate to say that it has long been underserved. Wage earners and small vendors—the backbone of the economy—have not been given the tools to participate in the formal credit ecosystem.
Yup is trying to change that.
With a few taps on a smartphone, users in Indonesia can now apply for a credit card through the Yup app, which also includes QR payment functionality. The company reports growing usage among young consumers for services typically associated with traditional banks. In addition to millions of users, Yup’s merchant network reportedly includes over 50 million outlets and handles around 50 million transactions per year.
The company’s founders identified the opportunity during fieldwork in Jakarta, when even affluent, well-connected individuals struggled to get a basic credit card from Bank Central Asia, the country’s largest bank. Yup was founded in 2021, and its team has spent three years refining a credit card product that is free to use and includes rewards.
The model appears to be gaining traction:
- Among wage earners making USD 500–600 monthly, average monthly spend on the Yup card reportedly exceeds USD 300, covering about 80% of daily needs aside from rent. Many users already have debit cards or e-wallets but have shifted primary spending to Yup.
- Yup also serves as a high-engagement app. Daily active user (DAU) rates are around 30%, with monthly active user (MAU) rates at nearly 70%. Users reportedly open the app more than 20 times a month, comparable to popular lifestyle apps in China.
- Revenue streams extend beyond interest margins. Yup also earns through in-app marketing, lifestyle perks, and user traffic conversion.
This card has given Indonesia’s youth and working class a shot at being trusted on a financial level. More than just offering credit, Yup is helping users establish a financial identity, laying the groundwork for broader financial inclusion. Its ambitions extend beyond Indonesia.
When 36Kr interviewed founder Zhang Dong and CFO Guo Tong of Finture, the company behind Yup, Southeast Asia was fast emerging as a new hub for supply chain shifts, capital spillover, and technology diffusion.
As offshore manufacturing fuels job creation and consumer spending across Southeast Asia, Yup is well-placed to expand its footprint. The company is embedded in the daily financial routines of wage earners, serving high-frequency credit use cases and operating across one of Indonesia’s largest merchant networks. It also seeks to build financial infrastructure from the ground up, collecting data and modeling user behavior in ways that respect local religious practices, languages, and social norms. This groundwork supports not only its own operations but also contributes to the national credit reporting system.
In 2024, Yup reported facilitating the submission of over 30 million consumer credit records to Indonesia’s central bank.
Effectively, Yup is applying two decades of Chinese credit technology experience to a market with distinct and complex challenges. Traditional banks, limited by physical branch networks and rigid lending standards, have often overlooked this segment. Yup identified a structural gap and is working to fill it through digital infrastructure.
Its advantage lies in converting fragmented data trails into usable credit profiles, and leveraging those profiles to drive both user engagement and revenue.
Upgraded playbook
Yup started with credit cards, but it’s steadily evolving into a bundled services platform. At its core, the company aims to redefine fintech in Southeast Asia by aligning its offerings with local culture, language, religious practices, and social behaviors, rather than relying solely on conventional economic frameworks.
For instance, Indonesian users may not understand APRs (annual percentage rates), but they understand the importance of Ramadan donations. So Yup’s Ramadan program, featuring interest-free credit and logistics-tracked charity programs, outperforms conventional marketing. The company also scores micro merchants based on WhatsApp group activity, dynamically adjusts farm loan limits based on flood warnings from the meteorological bureau, and even predicts repayment intent based on mosque donation patterns.
Yup is also expanding into lifestyle services. Using transaction data, it enables merchant reviews and is building what it describes as Indonesia’s first business rating and booking platform, akin to a localized version of Yelp. It has formed partnerships with nearly 1,000 brands, including KFC, Burger King, Haagen-Dazs, Nike, Adidas, and Alfamart. New in-app features include loyalty programs and a rewards marketplace, positioning Yup closer to a lifestyle membership service than a traditional bank.
Zhang told 36Kr that it’ll be at least five more years before a true superapp emerges in Southeast Asia. For now, the region’s biggest players—Shopee, Grab, Gojek, Lazada, TikTok, Temu—are still locked in on securing market leadership for their core verticals. None seem ready to commit resources to specialized areas like payments.
“Grab came in through ride-hailing. But Yup reaches consumption scenes in villages without paved roads. That’s the difference,” Zhang said.
On the ground, central banks in Southeast Asia are pushing hard to unify QR code payment standards and phase out fragmented QR deployments by e-wallet providers. That’s where payment licenses come in.
Yup holds Indonesia’s highest-tier electronic money license. It took the founding team nearly two years to acquire it, during a period when the Indonesian regulator had effectively paused new issuances since 2020. This license allows Yup to integrate with a QR code payment network spanning over 50 million merchants. The company’s physical card also supports transactions on millions of point-of-sale terminals across Indonesia.
In short, Yup’s product can be used for QR code payments at any Indonesian store. It has also sealed a strategic partnership with Visa, making it the only fintech company in Indonesia with that credential. Yup supports all online transactions in the country, integrated with every e-commerce platform. Its credit card identity ensures seamless compatibility in each of the major digital ecosystems.
By combining credit card transaction models with QR-based e-wallet payments, Yup naturally fits into every corner of Indonesia’s commerce landscape. “No platform rejects credit cards. No platform refuses QR payments. And no scenario excludes e-wallet standards,” Zhang said.
This full coverage of both online and offline transaction scenarios gives Yup a distinct edge in user acquisition. More than 80% of its users come through organic channels. They discover Yup in thousands of Indomaret convenience stores, at over 700 KFC locations, 60 CGV cinemas, hundreds of HokBen ramen shops, and countless family-run corner stores.
Not every team seeking to strike gold in Indonesia can do what Yup has done. “The product design, business models, and structures forged in China’s internet wave—we take these for granted. But here, nobody else knows them,” Guo told 36Kr. In this sense, Yup is disruptive.
Zhang started his career at Accenture, later becoming a VC and serial entrepreneur with a decade of fintech experience in Southeast Asia. Fellow founder Zou Zhili previously led credit card businesses for ANZ in Southeast Asia, and was chief risk officer at BNPL firm Atome. Before joining Yup, CFO Guo was vice president of investment banking at Merrill Lynch, with extensive experience across Asia and the US.
To start a global fintech company here requires living locally, speaking the language, understanding cultural norms, building a team, securing licenses, redesigning products, and implementing workflows. Some Western teams struggle to adapt. Meanwhile, Chinese teams rarely commit long-term, and local teams often lack the know-how. That’s how Yup has found itself with no real competitors—at least for now.
To take root in a market, the deepest moat may not be product or capital. It’s whether you’re earlier and more attuned to where the market is going.
Southeast Asia’s Nubank?
For a while now, the media has called Yup “the Nubank of Southeast Asia.” It may be a fair comparison. Like Brazil’s Nubank or Mexico’s Stori, Yup offers credit cards and consumer credit based on financial inclusion. The original inspiration was Capital One in the US, which served underbanked communities nationwide.
Back in early 2016, when Zhang was still an investor, he spent two weeks in Brazil conducting due diligence on Nubank. He was roused by founder David Velez and came away with a new view of how internet products could redefine credit cards. That was the spark for his entrepreneurial journey.
Across global markets, digital banks have reached massive scale: Revolut and Monzo in the UK, N26 in Germany, Chime in the US. These business models have proven themselves in mature economies. Reportedly, Nubank now serves over 30 million credit card users and generates billions in annual revenue, commanding a valuation above USD 50 billion.
But Indonesia, with a comparable population of nearly 300 million, poses a different challenge. Nubank aimed to displace loan sharks and clean up financial corruption. Yup’s challenge is more elemental. It seeks to introduce the very concept of credit to first-time users. Nubank fought legacy banks. Yup is building infrastructure from scratch: defining the rules and bringing users into the game.
That’s a harder job. And it helps explain how Yup has grown its revenue sixfold in less than a year since its Series B funding round in August 2024—because the playing field is still wide open.
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Ren Qian for 36Kr.