Crowdo enters Indonesia market

Crowdo enters Indonesia market

Home-grown crowdfunding portal Crowdo has expanded to Indonesia to offer peer-to-peer lending to businesses there.

Crowdo will use its platform to match Indonesian investors with companies there which need loans for working capital.

Borrowers repay the principal sum with interest.

Since Crowdo will offer only collateralised loans, the interest borrowers pay is expected to be lower.

In a pilot run over recent months, 200 companies were successfully funded and recorded no defaults on payments, said a statement from Crowdo.

The site will go public later this year.

Crowdo is inviting select investors seeking higher yields with new investment opportunities to participate in these deals.

Co-founder Leo Shimada said: “Our clients have robust businesses with sound repayment capabilities but are unable to access traditional financing systems due to the lack of existing relationships with financial institutions.”

It is a multibillion-dollar market, he said, as small and medium-sized Indonesian companies are underserved by banks. Last month, Crowdo was licensed by the Malaysian authorities to run an equity-based crowdfunding platform there.

With its expansion to these two countries, Crowdo, formerly known as Crowdonomic, is the first South-east Asian crowdfunding operator to offer debt-based and equity-based crowdfunding.