In Kuningan City, a scruffy mall in central Jakarta, adjacent signs from Ovo's and Gojek’s payments arm Go-Pay each offer shoppers 20% cashback on their purchases.
In the ring also, fighting hard for the attention of Indonesian consumers, is LinkAja, the mobile wallet and payment service launched in March by state-owned enterprises, plus privately owned latecomers including Ant Financial-backed startup Dana.
Rival payments applications are mushrooming across Indonesia and are engaged in a brutal subsidy war to attract consumers to use their apps.
From the get-go, Ovo’s strategy was to be an open ecosystem. It partnered...