Insignia sees Payfazz going places with boots-on-the-ground solution to Indonesia's unbanked

THERE has been a lot of talk about Indonesia's unbanked population, but not many businesses are actually walking the walk to serve them, says Insignia Ventures Partners founding managing partner Tan Yinglan.

Fintech startup Payfazz, however, has been raising an offline army of agents to literally cross that last mile, he says.

Insignia led a pre-Series A investment round via convertibles into the Indonesian startup in September 2017, alongside other notable investors such as alumni of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, Vertex Ventures, Convergence Ventures and MDI Ventures. It declined to reveal the size of the deal.

Payfazz ropes in offline agents across Indonesia to help people without bank accounts to access digital financial services with cash. In Payfazz's initial model, these agents accept cash from users and convert that cash into balances on the users' Payfazz accounts that can then be used to pay bills, with the agents and Payfazz collecting fees in the middle. Since Insignia's investment, Payfazz has leveraged the same mechanism and its agent network to roll out other financial services such as peer-to-peer (P2P) transfer …