Alibaba's payment affiliate Ant Financial Services has formed partnership with Indonesia's Emtek Group.

The companies will jointly develop a set of financial services and it will include a payment platform to be launched on the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) that Emtek acquired in 2016. Aside from BBM, the partnership will launch mobile payments technology to e-commerce, over-the-top (OTT) and online-to-offline (O2O) services, merchants and platforms in Indonesia. However, they did not mention any companies to be included in the list. 

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“Ant Financial has proven know-how in delivering payment and other financial solutions to a large and growing mobile audience in China and enabling its partners globally, and we are looking forward to replicating and creating this success in Indonesia,” said Alvin Sariaatmadja, CEO of Emtek.

Blackberry Messenger is the widely used messaging app in Indonesia, serving 63 million Indonesians monthly. Emtek’s goal is to make BBM a self-contained ecosystem, providing a host of web services including e-commerce. At present, Indonesian BBM users can shop in the marketplace Bukalapak without leaving the app.

The Emtek Group operates other platforms such as online publishers Liputan6.com, Bola.com, Bintang.com, Vidio.com, careers portal Karir.com, and travel portal Reservasi.com. It addition, it runs two national TV networks.

Alibaba’s Ant Financial latest move is included in the goal of Alibaba’s developing of network of online payments platforms as well as global expansion of its services. Ant Financial will receive access to Emtek’s huge and heavily regulated market as well as start-up investments such as e-commerce service Bukalapak. Meanwhile, Emtek will be able to tap the expertise of Ant Financial, which operates the Alipay global mobile payments platform with 450 million users. 

TagsAlibaba, china, Ant Financial, Emtek, Indonesia, mobile payments services