The market in Indonesia appears to have a good shot in cities and areas of more dense population.
Although mobile payments and wallet services have been struggling to take hold in many parts of the world, in Indonesia, the trend appears to be slanted toward the urban areas, where there is considerable potential still left untapped.
While some early adopters are already using digital wallet technology, they remain the minority.
It is believed that while there are a small number of people who are using mobile payments for transferring money online and are using smartphone transactions to complete purchases while in stores and restaurants, the majority of people are still using more traditional methods to for shopping and paying, meaning that there is still a lot of potential out there that is not being used.
At the moment, only 1 percent of Indonesia’s urban population is taking part in mobile payments.
In Indonesia’s large cities, only one in every one hundred people have used their smartphones for money transferring services, says a report that was published by Ericsson that looked into mobile commerce as a whole in emerging countries in Asia. At the same time, the findings of the report determined that 57 percent of urban residents were willing to use mobile money to pay their bills within the near future.
The research for this report involved the participation of 2,000 people in a number of cities across Indonesia, such as Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya. This sample was used to represent the approximately 24 million people who currently reside in the urban areas throughout the country, said Ericsson within its report.
Senior advisor at Ericsson ConsumerLab, Sofia Jorman, explained that “Based on the findings, we see that there is huge potential for mobile money in Indonesia […] with safety, convenience and speed being the key drivers.”
Jorman went on to discuss the potential for mobile payments in Indonesia by saying that as about 52 percent of the population of the country lives in its cities and as the number of people from rural areas that moves into the cities continues to rise, the ability to quickly and easily send money back home again has become necessary and is increasing in its use.
