In October 2017, a rule written a year earlier by Bank Indonesia caught up with Grab. Under the central bank's e-money licensing regime, e-commerce firms without a licence had to stop letting users top up balances. Grab, with millions of riders, suddenly had no wallet.
OVO had one. Its e-money licence arrived in August 2017, and by September the wallet was live. It had begun life inside the Lippo Group, the conglomerate of the Riady family, as a way to reward shoppers across Lippo's malls. Nobody had planned for it to become the payment rail of a ride-hailing giant.
Competitors such as GoPay and Telkomsel's T-Cash had head starts, but OVO had paperwork, a retail empire for merchants, and a partner that needed it.
The pairing made a quiet kind of sense. The Riady family was already an investor in Grab through Venturra. So the app that had been a mall loyalty tool was relaunched as 'GrabPay powered by OVO'. By 20 December 2017 it was the fourth most popular app on Google Play in Indonesia.
That is the part of the story that is easy to miss. OVO did not win a customer fight; it won a licensing one. Competitors such as GoPay and Telkomsel's T-Cash had head starts, but OVO had paperwork, a retail empire for merchants, and a partner that needed it. When it first launched, it leaned hard on the Lippo name, and a survey found 63% of its users recognised it as a Lippo product.
Money followed the usage. In December 2017, Tokyo Century was reported to have put in US$116 million for 20%. Grab invested in 2018. Tokopedia joined in March 2019, when CB Insights estimated OVO's value at US$2.9 billion. That October it was named Indonesia's fifth unicorn and its first in fintech. It bought a peer-to-peer lender, Taralite, and added investment and insurance products through partners such as Prudential and Manulife.
Then the owners changed. In 2021 Grab lifted its stake to 79.5%, and in October bought out Tokopedia and part of Lippo's shares to reach about 90%. The company that started as a Lippo mall app was now mainly a Grab asset. Leadership shifted too, with Karaniya Dharmasaputra named president director in 2019 after Andrian Suherman.
OVO is also a story with few visible heroes. There is no garage, no single founder's late night. Public sources describe a corporate decision, a licence, and a partner in a hurry.
For a first-time founder the lesson is unglamorous and useful. Regulation can be a moat. When a rule forces a giant to look for a partner, the startup with the licence in hand is the one that picks up the phone. OVO's breakthrough was not an invention. It was being ready when the door opened.