Hendra Kwik grew up in Jambi, a city on Sumatra far from the glass towers of Jakarta, and he has been blunt about it. "I come from a village," he told KrASIA in 2020. He meant it as an explanation, not an apology.
He studied chemical engineering at the Bandung Institute of Technology, one of Indonesia's best-known universities. After graduating he took a job in Brazil with a global oil and energy company, a long way from both Jambi and Bandung. Later he visited Silicon Valley and MIT, and toured startup ecosystems in Latin America. When he came back to Indonesia he chose to join Kudo, a startup whose founder was an ITB senior, over other offers.
At Kudo he handled business development and growth strategy, and that meant travelling to towns and villages across Java. What he heard there sounded familiar. Villagers wanted to know how to get loans for their small businesses and how to send money to their families. Their questions matched the ones he remembered from Jambi.
In 2016 he launched Payfazz with Ricky Winata and Jefriyanto. The model was simple. Payfazz would recruit agents, often small shopkeepers, who could sell mobile credit, take bill payments and handle transfers for neighbours with no bank account. The company earned a small commission, and so did the agents.
The obstacles were not glamorous. Financial literacy in rural areas was low. Fraudsters posed as Payfazz agents. When COVID-19 hit, the average transaction size dipped slightly. Even so, by August 2020 the company reported about 250,000 agents serving around 10 million users, handling more than Rp1tn a month in transactions. In early June 2020 it had closed a US$53m Series B led by B Capital Group and Insignia Ventures, bringing total funding to US$74.1m across four rounds, according to Crunchbase. It also secured an e-money licence from Bank Indonesia. In 2022 it merged with Singapore's Xfers to form Fazz Financial Group, with Kwik as group chief executive.
The founder's insight was to treat his own origin as a data point. Many founders build for users they imagine. Kwik built for users he remembered, and the questions they kept asking him were the business plan.