Bukalapak - Making tax payments easy with APIs

“Bukalapak is proud to continue the strong digital partnership with DBS Indonesia to broaden our services as an online marketplace. The breakthroughs that we have developed jointly have significantly contributed to cementing Bukalapak’s place as a leading ecommerce platform in the country. We look forward to more innovations on the digital journey with DBS Indonesia so we can keep providing the very best digital experience for our merchants and users.”

Natalia Firmansyah, Chief Finance Officer, PT Bukalapak.com

About Bukalapak

Founded in 2010, Bukalapak is one of Indonesia’s leading online marketplaces and unicorn companies owned and operated by PT Bukalapak.com. The retail platform enables individual entrepreneurs to conduct customer-to-customer (C2C) transactions, as well as for small and medium-sized businesses to open online stores. In 2014, Bukalapak launched an Android app for buyers to access goods or services and transact on their smartphones. It currently has more than four million pelapak (Bukalapak online sellers) across the country.

Enhancing Platform and Processes

When Indonesia allowed non-banks and the postal service to be used as tax payment channels, Bukalapak wanted to enable its merchants to fulfil their tax obligations on its platform.

Bukalapak also wanted to improve the customer experience for credit card bill payment. Previously with another bank, payments were effected in batches via an offline connection to each of the major credit card issuers in Indonesia. Major reconciliation issues, including failed payments, resulted in the temporary suspension of this service in Bukalapak’s app.

At the same time, a combination of the 24/7 nature of the ecommerce business and manual banking processes was taking a toll on Bukalapak staff. They not only worked weekdays, but also weekends, preparing and uploading payment files to their corporate internet banking platform so that funds could be disbursed quickly to its merchants.

Seamless Payments, Faster Disbursements

Bukalapak collaborated with DBS to enhance its platform for tax and credit card payments, as well as to shorten the disbursement process cycle time for its merchant payouts to within its service level agreement standard.

Leveraging a string of APIs from DBS RAPID (Real-time APIs with DBS), DBS provided a comprehensive solution that not only enabled the ecommerce giant to introduce a seamless tax payment service on its platform, but also automated its end-to-end payment process.

The DBS RAPID’s Bank Account Verification API helps validate beneficiaries' account details prior to executing transactions, thus reducing the occurrence of failed payments and reducing re-work in the finance function in the process.

Transformed Service Experience

With the help of DBS RAPID, Bukalapak managed to expand its services and improve the experience for both merchants and users, and more importantly, reduced processing costs and working hours for its staff.

By building a new and reliable channel to service the tax payment needs of their new and existing users, Bukalapak also became the first appointee as a non-bank partner to effect tax payments with Indonesia's Third Generation State Revenue Module (MPN G3).

With digitisation, payments and disbursements are now made quickly, anytime of the week. The substantial reduction in time taken to complete credit card payments has improved credit cardholders’ overall experience. Bukalapak’s merchants also benefit from faster access to funds with merchant payout processing time reduced from six hours to one hour.