Indonesian open finance platform Ayoconnect said Monday it has closed a $15 million series B financing round led by Tiger Global.
The round was joined by PayU, the payments and fintech business of Prosus, and Alto Partners, as well as individual strategic investors, including Plaid Co-Founder William Hockey and Jerry Ng, President Commissioner of Bank Jago, Ayoconnect said in a statement.
Ayoconnect which claimed itself as the largest open finance platform in Indonesia with more than 200 application programming interfaces (API) customers and 4,000 embedded finance products said it will use the funds to satisfy increasing customer demand for more products and use cases.
It said it will use the new funds to continue launching new products and increase its capacity so it can absorb accelerating demand.
It said in the first half of 2022, the company will launch Indonesia’s first-ever direct debit service, and this API will transform financial services for Indonesian consumers and their suppliers by automating recurring payments directly from customers’ bank accounts.
It also said plans are underway to offer clients cards-as-a-service, and Ayoconnect is set to begin its regional expansion.
“After six years of building new rails for Indonesian finance, today Ayoconnect is the most robust and in-demand open finance platform in the country. We are building the AWS of open finance with the most complete offering globally so that we can power the companies of today and the tech unicorns of tomorrow. We are proud to receive the backing of some of the world’s most renowned investors,” said Jakob Rost, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Ayoconnect.
Ayoconnect claimed itself as the Southeast Asia’s largest open finance API platform. It enables product managers and developers to choose from a wide range of embedded finance and data solutions to grow their business. It remains in the background, focused on building and operating its unique full stack financial API infrastructure while allowing its clients to unlock new revenues and expand.
Founded in 2016, Ayoconnect’s API stack has seen rapid adoption. It is trusted by more than 200 companies, including leading banks, retailers, e-commerce, fintech, and e-wallets such as Bank Mandiri, DANA, Indomaret, and Bukalapak. Ayoconnect processes more than 500 million API hits annually.
With its full-stack open finance ecosystem, Ayoconnect said it is looking to provide infrastructure for Southeast Asian companies in a seamless way. Instead of building or buying technology, the startup allows companies to embed more than 4,000 financial products in plug-and-play fashion through its network of APIs. The platform benefits from official working relations with Indonesia’s leading banks and regulators and is the only open finance platform globally to offer fintech- and banking-as-a-service as well as data-as-a-service APIs for both banked and unbanked.
Ayoconnect’s stack is divided into two main areas. On the embedded finance side, it helps companies of any size launch financial products using APIs such as phone top-up, utilities payments, embedded insurance, and auto-billing. Banking-as-a-service APIs provide account opening, disbursement, credit, investment, savings, and other capabilities. On the data side, it enables companies to make better decisions by pulling banking data, such as account validation, account balance, transactions, and liabilities.
Ayoconnect also provides data on unbanked and underbanked people through bill payments, e-wallet, location, phone, ecommerce, payroll and other alternative data. New use-case APIs are added regularly.
“At PayU, we have always believed in partnering with promising entrepreneurs who share our vision of a world without financial borders. Ayoconnect has built new rails for Indonesian finance as well as a one stop shop API for economic actors within it. The talent within the team, relations with the banking and technology sectors and phenomenal growth were all important indicators for us that Ayoconnect has what it takes to execute at the highest level,
“We are delighted to join in Ayoconnect’s journey as it evolves its offerings to serve more businesses, helps the next generation of startups to grow, and brings a higher degree of inclusion to the entire region,” said Fady Abdel Nour, Global Head of Merger and Acquisition and investments, at PayU.