Bukalapak Stops Paylater Service BukaCicilan

PT Bukalapak com Tbk (IDX: BUKA) has stopped services paylater BukaCicilan which has been operating for five years. This service will no longer operate as of February 29, 2024.

As reported TechinAsia, Bukalapak management denied that the closure of BukaCicilan was related to operational restrictions on its partners Akulaku which will take place since October 2023. Meanwhile, OJK has just lift sanctions restrictions Akulaku Finance on February 29.

BukaCicilan is a service paylater with an installment payment scheme without a credit card. BukaCicilan service for the first time launch in August 2018 by cooperating Akulaku as a provider of financing services. Both Bukalapak and Akulaku previously received investment from Ant Financial.

At the start of its existence, BukaCicilan claimed to have received around 1000 applications organically, where the GMV obtained from this figure reached IDR 10 billion.

In the Fintech Report report by DSInnovate, paylater is one of the financial services that is growing rapidly in Indonesia, and is also quite popular as an online payment method. This is because paylater offers short to long term loan schemes with a fast registration and approval process.

As of May 2023, the Financial Services Authority (OJK) recorded user growth paylater reached 33,25% (YoY) to 18,8 million contracts.

Survey Kredivo and Katadata Insight Center (KIC) revealed that paylater encourage people's desire to shop online thanks to the ease of application and use. His research shows use paylater for transactions reached 16,2%. followed by the transfer method around 10,2%.

Currently, several players paylater dominated by Kredivo, GoPayLater, Shopee PayLater, and Traveloka PayLater. This service targets various needs, ranging from daily necessities, online shopping, or accommodation and entertainment (plane tickets, trains, hotels).

Bukalapak chooses a collaboration strategy

Different from unicorn While working on technology infrastructure from end to end, Bukalapak chose collaboration as a strategy. This step was taken so that the company can focus on working on core businesses that gain a large contribution to performance, namely Mitra Bukalapak and virtual product (Gaming and digital)—which is called having take rate and high margins.

It is known that collaborative products that are not related to the core business are the result of synergies with a number of strategic investors in Bukalapak. Take the example of a major payment service marketplace, the company collaborates with the digital payment platform DANA, which was founded by the EMTEK Group, which is also one of Bukalapak's strategic investors.

Other partnership products, OpenSavings, is the result of collaboration with Standard Chartered bank which targets the Bukalapak user ecosystem, including the MSME segment. Standard Chartered is one of Bukalapak's investors. Apart from that, the company also established a joint venture with PT Ashmore Asset Management Indonesia Tbk for digital investment product partnerships.

Meanwhile, their competitors, Tokopedia and Shopee, prefer to work on their own infrastructure for their service ecosystem, such as digital wallets, paylater, to logistics. In the end, the GoTo Group has made savings on infrastructure costs in order to pursue profitability since last year.

Meanwhile, Blibli synergizes with the platform paylater Indodana, a subsidiary of Cermati which is also part of the Djarum group.