The re-branding activity has apparently been a new trend in Indonesia’s startup industry. In fact, no less than DapurMasak, Spavista, and CERI have just got re-branded. Various reasons of re-branding were made. However, those startups commonly aim for much better performance, and this might be what iMoney Indonesia, a banking products comparison platform, had in mind when it decided to re-brand itself into AturDuit.
In general, AturDuit doesn’t change what iMoney Indonesia provided. This re-branding, according to an official information that we got, was held to enable the startup getting closer to Indonesian ‘ people, as the name ‘AturDuit’ would be much more familiar to the people than ‘iMoney’. This is in line with AturDuit’s vision of reaching as many Indonesian people as possible.
However, this decision by AturDuit may backfire the startup should it can’t manage the brand well, since there is already NgaturDuit which focuses on money and investment management. The likeliness of those two startups’ names may be an issue, even though they aren’t directly competing each other. This brings back memories to a moment when BNI’s Blandja got quite a challenge from Telkom and eBay’s Blanja. In the end, the two startups walks each own path.
The re-branding of AturDuit is claimed to increase the services’ safety. This is indeed the main issue that the startup holds, as it allows users to apply for the financial products online. This is reflected from the using of “https” instead of “http” that imoney held.
Interestingly, AturDuit is the only iMoney Group’s brand in Asia, among others in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, and Hong Kong, that gets re-branded. This might be due to the lack of performance that iMoney Indonesia had, at least compared to other iMoneys in other countries.
In Indonesia, online financial comparison platforms haven’t had many years to perform, but it doesn’t stop the fact that its popularity keeps growing as time goes by. As a matter of fact, a number of startups working on that scene have enjoyed quite a fame, just take a look at KreditGogo or HaloMoney.
That being said, it’s most likely that AturDuit’s re-branding would mark a new dimension of competition between startups working in Indonesia’s financial industry. This and the fact that financial products are being offered with much more intensity nowadays have opened the opportunity of having stricter market and competition. As a consideration, iMoney Group alone was responsible for Rp 4,4 billion house loans, 65,000 credit cards and personal loans application, and a number of partnership with 50 financial institution in six countries in 2013.
