What happened: The Indonesian e-commerce provider Bukalapak made news in the embedded finance world by partnering with Standard Chartered and launching a financial services unit called BukaTabungan in 2021 (Bukalapak blog post from 2021). As subscriber Shaul David discovered, Standard Chartered has announced the shutdown of the Bukalapak financial offering (Shaul’s LinkedIn post). The BukaTabungan website is also offline, and an Instagram post seems to be the only online statement from the e-commerce giant.
What this means: Both companies are extremely quiet about the shutdown of this partnership. The only information that gave any potential reason for this decision mentions internal friction between Bukalapak and Standard Chartered (KB Valbury Sekuritas). From what I gathered, the product offering and size of the business never got big, and we can only speculate if this caused friction between the two companies or if friction was the reason for the limited success in the first place.
It is noteworthy that Bukalapak recently announced that it would stop selling physical products and purely focus on digital products (physical products made up ~4% of the total volume; Jakarta Daily). At the same time, Bukalapak plans to focus more on mobile credit, utility bill payments, and government transactions. So perhaps the end of the Standard Chartered partnership does not mean Bukalapak will leave the embedded finance world altogether; instead, it might focus on other financial products and perhaps also different fintech partnerships.
PS: Thanks again, Shaul, for sharing this news with me. Feel free to ping me if you see relevant embedded finance stories. If I cover the news, I’ll tag you.
