Ringkas Reaches 33 Billion Rupiah Funding, Digitize Home Ownership Loan Process

Digital residential credit platform Ringkas today (31/5) announced a pre-early funding of $2.3 million or more than 33 billion Rupiah.

Investors participating in this funding round include 500 Global, Iterative Capital, Creative Gorilla Capital, Teja Ventures, Init-6, and several unicorn founders.

After deciding to start a new initiative in 2021, Ilya Kravtsov, previously also known as the founder of PouchNATION, tried to find a solution that could solve a big problem in Indonesia. At that time he found that home ownership was quite an issue faced by many people in this country.

Then he met his two current colleagues, Leroy Pinto and Yoko Simon who have a fairly strong background in the technology world. Leroy has worked at Google and Amazon; while Yoko has 16 years of experience at Dell.

The three then developed the Ringkas platform with the aim of simplifying the home ownership credit (KPR) process for hundreds of millions of Indonesians.

Mission to Solve Home Ownership Problems

Brief found the fact that the penetration of residential loans in Indonesia is one of the lowest in the world with total bank loans equivalent to 3.25% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

In addition, Indonesia’s housing backlog continues to grow to date at 11.4 million units. The cause of this challenging situation is allegedly because 55% of the local state workforce in Indonesia consists of small and medium entrepreneurs, freelancers, to individuals without a definite contract.

With a mission to solve this home ownership problem, Ringkas tries to digitize the entire value chain process to create a smart platform that is able to simplify the residential loan process by adjusting customer profiles more efficiently, and targeting assets that meet the risk standards of financial institutions.

In the next 6 to 12 months, Ringkas is committed to focusing on developing its platform and serving tens of thousands of users as well as launching a platform for various initiatives that can have a big impact in Jakarta and its surroundings.

The platform is also targeting expansion into larger regions such as Southeast Asia. Even so, Rinkas emphasized that his platform does not provide loans directly.

In providing this service, Ringkas collaborates with financial institutions that provide loans, and then receives a fee for every successful transaction on the platform. However, Ilya also added that it is possible to provide this facility directly in the future.

Digitization in the Property Sector

Before the existence of proptech in Indonesia was seen, there was an assumption that the process of buying a house was difficult and time consuming, and generally people had the perception that property should be physically visible during the construction process.

However, with the development of the digital world and technology companies that facilitate digitization, this assumption is slowly fading.

According to the Lamudi Indonesia Property Market Trends report in the first semester of 2021, property sales increased by 36.8 percent on an annual basis compared to the previous year despite being affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This shows that the majority of property seekers, 36.7 percent, are in the general range of 18-35 years, and the proptech sector can stimulate property sales by attracting new buyers.

Regarding the use of technology in the property sector, Ilya also revealed that there are millions of home seekers and more than 12,000 developers in Indonesia. While on the other hand, there are more than 1,200 banks and financial institutions currently available.

His team saw that one of the secret ways to unlock this opportunity was to leverage technology that connected all players in the industry in a very simple, fast, and customer-focused way.

Several proptech players in Indonesia include Rumah123, 99.co, Rukita, and Beliruma. In addition, there is Pinhome, which recently launched the #CicilDiPinhome program to facilitate low-income people and non-fixed income (NFI) people to own their dream home.

Then there is the fintech platform for residential property financing, Gradana, which tries to make it easier for people to pay off their down payment or buy a house.