How KoinWorks Boosts Financial Literacy While Growing Retention and Reducing Cost Per User by 70%

Published on September 15, 2022
Reading time 4 min read
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How KoinWorks Boosts Financial Literacy While Growing Retention and Reducing Cost Per User by 70%

Indonesia is a country where more than half the population is underserved and unbanked. How has KoinWorks become Indonesia’s largest peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform? “The whole approach,” says Chief Product Officer Aditya Chintawar, “is educate, educate, educate.”
In this episode of the Mobile Presence podcast, our host Peggy Anne Salz interviews Aditya Chintawar about the unique approach KoinWorks has taken in developing and growing a platform that’s widely used and trusted both by retail customers and the small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) that power the Indonesian economy.
Chintawar has spent his career building value-based, customer-centric technology. As Chief Product Officer at KoinWorks, he leads a team developing products to support the company’s vision of becoming a leading neobank for SMEs in Indonesia—transforming how the country invests, transacts, and borrows money digitally.
With 1.5 million users, KoinWorks is both Indonesia’s first financial super app and the leading capital provider to the country’s digital and ecommerce merchants. An alternative to traditional financing, KoinWorks broadens financial accessibility by providing investment and liabilities products within a single platform and helps to improve financial literacy among underbanked and underserved SMEs and retail customers. The company is backed by some of the world’s top fintech investors and recently raised $108 million in Series C funding.

Bringing Financial Growth Opportunities to Consumers and SMEs

KoinWorks builds products that support inclusion and financial literacy. For retail customers, the company offers “a complete platform of products where they can invest their money,” says Chintawar. “Indonesians believe in living in the moment; they do not invest much for the future. It becomes important for us to build a healthy investment habit [and educate] the consumer base with a lot of good content.”
For SME customers, KoinWorks serves “business loans, invoice financing, supply chain financing,” Chintawar continues. During the pandemic, he notes, Indonesia’s 64 million SMEs accelerated their digitization efforts, but many “are still outside the formal financial ecosystem. KoinWorks plays a very important part in underwriting them and helping them with a loan.”

Financial Literacy Efforts Across Multiple Channels

Through educational content and omnichannel campaigns, KoinWorks has built trust among retail consumers and SMEs in Indonesia, which in turn has boosted referrals and ultimately, retention.
“You get very good content through our application,” says Chintawar. “The blog does wonders from a consumer point of view. We add social webinars, where we get financial consultants helping people plan their investment lifecycle. We do a lot of telemarketing activities where we educate people.” For SMEs, KoinWorks educates through a combination of in-app content and offline campaigns.
KoinWorks has also been able to successfully navigate the technical challenges of working within an emerging economy like Indonesia’s, where issues exist regarding Internet access and cellular connectivity. “If I need to stay in somebody’s mobile application,” explains Chintawar, “I need to be really compact in size but offer a lot of services.” The KoinWorks app must be able to “run at slow speeds but [allow the user to] fill a loan application.”

How a CleverTap Partnership Reduces Costs and Improves Retention

The company has been a CleverTap customer for more than three years; it uses CleverTap for boards, trends, funnels, dashboards, and cohorts to understand user behavior; journeys to influence customer decisions at each stage of the customer lifecycle; and user segmentation to identify key groups. CleverTap’s engagement and analytics features have helped KoinWorks reduce cost per active user by 70% and increase sales per customer by 30%.
Chintawar points to several CleverTap features as key to KoinWorks’ success in retaining users. Among them: funnel analysis, which he says helps “in a real-time manner, also retrospectively. Which channel worked the best? What money did we spend? We attribute it and then we harness that particular channel.” Cohort analysis, “which tells us, how did they behave on the app? What was their session length? We can slice by session length, transaction amount.” And RFM analysis, which helps KoinWorks create “very personalized communications. That forms the backbone for our CleverTap campaigns or our push notification campaigns.”
To hear more from Aditya Chintawar about overcoming behavioral and technical challenges to engage and retain customers in underserved markets, tune into the entire interview below.