Pegadaian Strengthens Role in the Financial Ecosystem, Distributes Business Loans Through Acceleration

Pegadaian again added its new portfolio as institutional lenders. This time, the company collaborated with Akseleran to distribute business loans to the SME segment of Rp30 billion.

AVP Digital Lending Product Pegadaian Indri Wijayanti revealed that this is the second portfolio of Pegadaian. Previously, the company debuted as institutional lenders in Investree with a value that cannot be stated.

"Acceleration is P2P lending the second that works with the Pawnshop. There is no further synergy with Acceleration yet, currently it is only limited to: Actioncalendar," he said when contacted DailySocial. Furthermore, Indri could not comment on further synergies being explored.

Meanwhile, in his official statement, the Co-founder and Chief Credit Officer of Akseleran Christopher Gultom revealed that this cooperation agreement had actually been carried out since November 2, 2020. The realization of loan disbursement is targeted for this December.

"The pawnshop does not only increase the number institutional lenders we have now reached 10 companies, but also complement our partners from the financial services sector. All of them have contributed 20 percent to the total loan disbursement in Akseleran," he explained.

As of the end of November, Akseleran had disbursed a total of Rp1,7 trillion in productive loans to 2.500 loans with more than 150 thousand lenders. Meanwhile, Akseleran recorded the highest loan record since the last three years in November of Rp120 billion.

Akseleran also recorded a growth in lending of up to 32 percent in the January-November 2020 period. Akseleran's total NPL is currently at 0,2 percent of the total business loans that have been disbursed.

Citing information Cash Some time ago, Pegadaian's Director of Technology and Digital Teguh Wahyono said that his party was preparing digital-based loans with a loan size of Rp 50 million-Rp 2 billion.

This loan will use two funding sources, namely (1) direct lending or directly from Pegadaian which targets SOEs through schemes invoice financing and (2) indirect sources (indirect lending) via P2P provider platforms lending. 

Transformation to strengthen position in the financial industry

Strategy to be institutional lenders is effort Pawnshop to transform in the digital finance ecosystem. In the future, Pegadaian wants to offer other financial services to a wider market, not limited to pawn services. Pegadaian has even synergized with Tokopedia for gold services and launched the Pegadaian Digital Service (PDS).

Currently, Pegadaian has three main businesses, namely pawning, financing, and gold investment. Based on company data, 90 percent of Pegadaian's revenue is contributed by pawn services, while 2 million customers out of a total of 13,86 million customers in 2019 have transacted through the PDS application.

Talk about institutional lenders, Pegadaian is not the first and only company to implement this strategy. In recent years, a number of players in the financial industry, especially banking, have begun to "invest" their capital through the P2P platform lending.

Not without reason, the large segment of MSMEs and people who have not been reached by banks (unbankable & underbanked) has become one of the triggers for the increase in P2P business in Indonesia.

Based on latest report published DSResearch, the banking and financing sectors are still the contributors Actioncalendar largest on the P2P platform. Meanwhile, as many as 44,7 percent of platforms fintech have 1 institutional lenders and 34,2 percent have 2-5 institutional lenders, followed by 5-10 (6,6%) and more than 10 (1,3%).

This report reveals that corporate steps are included as institutional lenders be one approach to increase their service coverage to segments that have not been reached so far. This step is considered to be able to encourage financial inclusion for the people of Indonesia.