Southeast Asia's "Nubank": Building a Credit Card Business for Tens of Millions in Countries Without Credit Bureaus

"Mining massive traffic from the blind spots of traditional banking." By Qian Ren

Part 01

The Rule-Maker

What does it take to issue a credit card in Indonesia?

You have to simultaneously solve multiple challenges: fundamental religious and cultural differences, unfamiliar regulatory environments, massive gaps in personal credit infrastructure, and the seductive lure of predatory interest rates.

Indonesia has a population of nearly 280 million, with over 80 million salaried workers earning stable incomes, 55 million of whom have social security. Yet outside of the small elite served by traditional banks, credit card penetration doesn't exceed 3% — a staggering 97% of people aren't even "designed into the system."

Local financial institutions, whether in technological capability or operational knowhow, remain stuck in something like the "Stone Age." Chinese teams going abroad understand technology but mostly can't resist the temptation of payday loans and other high-interest products. Prospectors from Singapore and India tend toward BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) models like Kredivo.

The deeper reason: lacking digital risk management capabilities, Indonesian traditional banks prefer collateral-based asset operations. They maintain extremely strict准入 standards for all unsecured retail banking business, mostly conducting manual background checks on customers. Banks prefer to use credit cards to service existing premium whitelist clients — large savings account holders, healthy auto and mortgage borrowers, and the like.

So the biggest lie about fintech in Southeast Asia has been that "this market is undeveloped." The truth: it's been developed for decades, yet no one ever gave salaried workers and small merchants a "credit identity" — they are the capillaries of the economy.

One company changed this.

Today in Indonesia, you open your phone, download the YUP wallet app, and within minutes you can apply for a credit card and activate YUP Wallet's scan-to-pay function. A growing number of young Indonesians are getting used to accessing bank-like products and services through YUP. Beyond its millions of individual users, YUP now covers over 50 million merchants, processing nearly 50 million transactions annually.

Seven years ago, when YUP's founding team was doing field research in Jakarta, they saw that some excellent local VC peers with strong educational backgrounds and solid incomes couldn't even get a basic credit card from BCA (Indonesia's largest commercial bank). They smelled opportunity.

After founding YUP in 2021, the team spent three years cracking the most critical step in building a payment foundation — creating a credit card product that users "want to use, can use for free, and get discounts with."

The model has now been validated as follows:

First, among salaried workers earning an average of $500–600 monthly, a single user spends over $300 per month on their YUP credit card. Essentially, outside of rent, 80% of daily expenses go through YUP. These people all have basic bank debit cards, cash, and other e-wallets — but with YUP, they shift their spending, making YUP the primary or even sole payment tool for Indonesia's working class.

Second, YUP isn't just a simple physical credit card but a high-engagement, high-traffic platform. YUP's app has a DAU (daily active user) rate approaching 30% and MAU (monthly active user) rate near 70%, with users visiting the app more than 20 days per month on average — rivaling some domestic local lifestyle platforms in China.

Third, revenue doesn't rely solely on interest spreads but also on integrated marketing, lifestyle benefits, and traffic monetization within the app.

This card gives Indonesian youth and working-class people "the right to be trusted" for the first time. Its underlying logic is no longer "credit limit" but "social identity confirmation": you are bound into a system. This card also gives YUP greater room for imagination across Southeast Asia.

At the time Anyong Waves ("暗涌Waves") began following this company and interviewing founder Dong Zhang and CFO Tong Guo, Southeast Asia was becoming a new base for supply chain relocation and the outward spillover of capital and technology.

As manufacturing spillover creates large numbers of jobs and drives consumption locally, the barriers YUP has already established in its ecological position will be amplified: directly binding to the daily consumption of salaried populations, controlling the highest-frequency "credit behavior" scenarios; covering Indonesia's largest merchant network, self-building a financial "ground network"; collecting data and building behavioral models without offending beliefs, languages, or behavioral norms, to build a large internet traffic pool; while also single-handedly helping Indonesia further improve its personal credit reporting system.

According to available information, in 2024 alone, YUP helped users report over 30 million healthy consumer credit records to the central bank.

In essence, what YUP is doing is taking the knowhow of China's credit payment evolution over the past 20 years and landing it on more complex, more difficult, and more explosive soil. Traditional banks, due to high physical branch costs and rigid risk models, have long neglected this impossible market. YUP seized this structural void and reshaped financial services through digital means.

YUP's core competitive advantage is converting Southeast Asians' "fragmented data footprints" into credit assets, and continuously mining traffic on top of this asset base.

Part 02

Leveling Up: From Payment to Ecosystem

YUP entered through credit cards but follows a "content platform aggregation" path, migrating its understanding of finance from economic models to a combined cognition of religion, community, language, and social behavior.

For example, Indonesian salaried users may not know what APR (annual percentage rate) is, but they definitely understand how important Ramadan donations are. So YUP's credit card interest-free period plus logistics-visualized donation "Ramadan Zone" is more effective than any marketing campaign. Additionally, YUP evaluates small merchant business stability through WhatsApp group activity; connects to meteorological bureau flood warnings to dynamically adjust agricultural loan amounts; and analyzes mosque donation frequency to predict user repayment willingness.

Beyond this, YUP expands through local lifestyle services and a refined benefits system.

The former is based on payment data, allowing users to rate merchants they patronize, gradually developing merchant rating recommendations, reservations, and other services. This is unprecedented in Indonesia, with more than a hint of Indonesia's "Dianping" (大众点评). The latter directly partners with nearly a thousand local and international brands like KFC, Burger King, Häagen-Dazs, Nike, Adidas, and Alfamart, adding benefit systems, points systems, and benefit malls within the app — doing a better job than banks at being a "lifestyle welfare club."

YUP turns the credit card into an API interface, converting activity into assets and transactions into traffic, preemptively building a local lifestyle ecosystem in financial soil without giant monopolies.

Dong Zhang told Anyong Waves that within five years, no monopolistic super-app will emerge in Southeast Asia. While potential giants exist — Shopee, Grab, Gojek, Lazada, TikTok, Temu — they remain locked in competition in their primary verticals. Until that main battle is won, it's difficult to divert resources and capital into more vertical domains like payments.

"Grab entered payments through ride-hailing scenarios, but YUP covers consumption scenarios deep into villages without paved roads. That's the biggest difference," Zhang said.

In offline scenarios, Southeast Asian central banks are vigorously pushing for unified payment QR codes, breaking the pattern of e-wallets independently铺设 codes. Payment licenses become crucial here.

YUP holds Indonesia's highest-tier e-money license — which the founding team spent nearly two years obtaining (the Indonesian regulator has essentially stopped issuing new licenses since 2020). This allows access to a payment QR code network of over 50 million merchants, while YUP's physical card supports POS transactions at millions of Indonesian merchants.

In other words, YUP's products can conduct scan-to-pay transactions at any store in Indonesia. It has also established a strategic partnership with Visa, the only Indonesian fintech company with this qualification. Simultaneously, YUP supports all Indonesian online transactions, covering all e-commerce platforms. The credit card identity allows YUP to seamlessly integrate into every giant's scenario.

YUP reached strategic cooperation with Visa to launch the YUP Visa credit card

Credit card transaction models叠加 e-wallet scan-to-pay — all payment scenarios naturally don't exclude YUP. Zhang believes: "No platform will reject a credit card, no platform will refuse QR code transactions, no scenario will reject standard e-wallet scan-to-pay services."

This full coverage of tens of millions of online and offline scenarios has allowed YUP to forge a differentiated user acquisition path. Zhang revealed that over 80% of users come from organic traffic. They come from tens of thousands of Indomaret convenience store chains, over 700 KFC outlets, 60 CGV cinema chains, hundreds of Hokben brand Japanese ramen shops, and countless mom-and-pop stores along the roadside.

Not every team that comes to Indonesia to prospect can achieve all this. "The product design, business models, and structures forged in China's internet wave — things we take for granted — nobody here knows about," Tong Guo told Anyong Waves. In these aspects, YUP can be considered a dimensional reduction strike. "Knowhow decides everything."

Dong Zhang previously worked at consulting firm Accenture, later serving as a venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur with 10 years of experience in Southeast Asian fintech. Co-founder Zhili Zou previously worked at Bank of Communications Credit Card Center, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group's Southeast Asian credit card business, and served as Chief Risk Officer at well-known Southeast Asian BNPL brand Atome. CFO Tong Guo, before joining YUP, was Vice President in the investment banking division at Merrill Lynch, with extensive investment, financing, and IPO experience in the US and Asia.

In a sense, as the founder of a global fintech company, you must personally live here, understand local language and culture, have banking resources, and be able to build teams, obtain licenses, modify products, and落地 processes — only then is survival possible. Western teams struggle with local conditions, Chinese teams don't want to stay long-term, and local teams lack knowhow. That's why YUP has had no real competitors in the short term.

The deepest moat for rooting in a market may not be product or capital, but rather: whether you understood earlier and better than others where this market is heading.

Part 03

Southeast Asia's Nubank?

For a long time, public reports habitually used "Southeast Asia's Nubank" to describe YUP — which is understandable. Brazil's Nubank and Mexico's Stori also provide credit cards and personal credit services, with the same underlying logic of inclusive finance. The progenitor was Capital One, which provided banking services to low-income populations across the US.

In early 2016, when Zhang was still working as an investor, he spent two weeks in Brazil deeply diligencing fintech startup Nubank. Founder David Vélez left a deep impression on him. At the time, Nubank's user behavior analysis and business model in Brazil changed his understanding of credit card attributes and internet product development paths. This was the spark that ignited his entrepreneurial fire.

Looking across global markets in recent years, massive digital banks have emerged: the UK's Revolut and Monzo Bank, Germany's N26, the US's Chime. In mature financial markets, digital banking business models have been fully validated. Nubank, in particular, supports a market cap of over $50 billion and annual revenue in the billions of dollars on the back of 30 million credit card users.

But when looking at Indonesia with its nearly 300 million people, the situation differs: Nubank in Brazil was a "dimensional reduction alternative to predatory lending," fighting financial corruption. YUP encounters users for whom the very concept of "credit" doesn't exist. Nubank fought traditional banks; YUP is building from flat ground — first defining the rules of the game, then bringing users into the arena.

The latter challenge is greater. This may also explain why, from its last funding round (August 2024 Series B) to now — less than a year — YUP's revenue has grown 6x: because the market is spacious enough.

One Series B investor once told us that he believed YUP, founded in 2021, happened to simultaneously possess two time windows: first, doing credit cards in Southeast Asia was a non-consensus play with virtually no competition; second, there was still enough hot money in the market, and capital was willing to give the team time to validate the basic model.

Looking back, relatively innovative financial products, technological advantages, a clear business development path, localization strategies enabled by team background, and international capital support collectively contributed to YUP's rise in Indonesia.

Regarding risk control — the top concern for fintech enterprises — YUP developed its own deep visual recognition system, achieving precise facial image matching and rapid search, ensuring data security while effectively identifying potential suspicious customers. The team also integrated multi-source data including financial transactions, consumer behavior, and assets and liabilities, combining LSTM and LightGBM algorithms to efficiently mine potential risk features in time series data. Additionally, the company applies large model technology in intelligent customer service, precision marketing, intelligent collections, and compliance supervision.

In YUP team's conception, they are not a Chinese company going abroad but a pure Southeast Asian local tech company from Day One. Over 80% of the nearly 300-person team are Southeast Asian locals, and the founding team has long worked and lived in Southeast Asia.

YUP has raised $70 million in funding historically, reached millions of users in four years, while maintaining low non-performing rates. Zhang revealed that the company hopes to achieve break-even in the second half of this year, with further expansion planned to Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and other markets.

"Serve over 50 million credit card users across Southeast Asia in the next 8–10 years, with plans to go public in 3–5 years," Zhang said.

Image sources | Unsplash / Courtesy of interviewees

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