Line Corporation, a Japanese communications and digital service group, has announced that it has expanded its Asia footprint by launching a digital bank that operates in Indonesia. This is now the third country where the group will offer this service.
Currently, the organization is already offering services in Thailand and Taiwan, the two countries where its instant messenger app is now the market leader. On June 11, 2021, Line announced that it was expanding its bank offering to Indonesia in partnership with the local arm of South Korea’s Hana Bank.
Line has been partnering with Hana Bank Indonesia since the Japanese company took a 20% stake in 2018.
The chief operating officer of Line Financial Asia, Young Eun Kim, said:
“The demand for digital transformation in the banking industry is growing rapidly all around the world. In Indonesia in particular, due to this market’s unique geographical characteristics.”
Demand might be high in the Indonesian market, but competition is also high. Recently, ride-hailing service Gojek announced an $18 billion merger with Tokopedia, an e-commerce group, to form the GoTo Group. One of the key reasons for the tie-up is to develop the dominant digital payments platform in this Asian archipelago.
While WhatsApp is still dominant in the global instant messenger market, Line is now the market leader in three of the ten nations where Facebook messenger apps are not market leaders including Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand. The Line app was created as an emergency solution for the firm’s employees during the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011.
