For about a year and a half, Vincent Iswara kept talking to Ant Financial about the digital wallet business he was already running in Indonesia. In the end the answer was a polite no. Ant's people decided his company was not the right vehicle for long-term growth. They did not say no to him.
That detail is easy to miss in the DANA story, which is usually told as a big-money launch: an Emtek-backed wallet, Alipay-grade technology, a national licence. But the founder at the centre of it had first been turned down as a business and kept as a person. He went on to learn inside Ant's ecosystem in China, saw how a mobile wallet could change the way ordinary people pay, and came home to build something different.
In an interview with Fintech News Singapore, Iswara described the first five to seven years as pretty much on the edge.
DANA was established in 2017. Iswara launched it on 11 November 2018, and the licence to operate as a fintech firm across Indonesia came on 5 December. The speed mattered. By the end of June 2019, DANA said it had 20 million users and 1.5 million transactions a day. Bills, game top-ups, barcode payments and online shopping were all folded into one app, working alongside banks such as Bank Mandiri, BCA and BRI.
Then the hard part started. In an interview with Fintech News Singapore, Iswara described the first five to seven years as pretty much on the edge. Rivals handed out cashback of 50 to 100 percent, so users came for the discount and left when it ended. Regulation kept moving. Investors were not always sure. He has admitted that the team doubted, early on, whether they were even in the right industry.
What almost nobody outside the company noticed was how many people stayed. Of the original 81 employees, 65 were still there after eight years, a retention rate most startups in a cashback war could not dream of. Iswara says the growth came from steady, small steps rather than one breakthrough, and that he still likes putting his hand to the dirty work with his team.
The money followed the patience. In 2022 DANA raised a US$250 million round with Sinar Mas units and Lazada Group joining, and reports put its valuation above US$1 billion. Later 01Fintech invested too. The company now says it serves more than 200 million users.
Iswara's own view of the market is unfashionable for a payments founder. He thinks Indonesia's problem is no longer access to financial apps but financial literacy, knowing what to do once the app is on the phone.
There is a lesson in the 18 months of talks that ended in rejection. The business Ant turned down was not the end of Iswara's story. It was the apprenticeship for the one that followed.