Mastercard and PT Artajasa Pembayaran Elektronis (Artajasa) have announced the official signing of a cooperation agreement aimed at supporting and enhancing the overall capability of Indonesia’s National Payment Gateway (NPG) ecosystem. This is the first partnership in the NPG ecosystem between a domestic switching company and an international payments network to receive Bank Indonesia’s official approval.

It also reaffirms both Artajasa and Mastercard’s long-term commitment towards furthering the National Non-Cash Movement through the development of electronic payments in the country, aligned with Indonesia’s Payment System (IPS) 2025 Visions roadmap. The partnership announcement comes at a strategic time, especially in light of the Indonesian government’s push towards boosting the contribution of the digital economy to the nation’s GDP.

Mastercard has made investments in Indonesia over the past three decades, and has been agile and active in working to fulfil the requirements stipulated in Bank Indonesia’s regulations. Its recent investment has been focused on completing the establishment of an on-soil payment processing infrastructure. 

Through the partnership with Artajasa, Mastercard will bring its globally deployed safety, security, fraud monitoring and scoring to bear for all domestic debit card transactions. Additionally, Mastercard will be focused on enhancing Artajasa’s capacity and capability in payment transaction processing.

Per Bank Indonesia’s regulations, domestic NPG switching institutions, such as Artajasa, are allowed to partner with a maximum of two non-NPG Switching Providers. The same regulations also allow Mastercard to partner with a maximum of two of the four NPG Switching Providers. This is in compliance with Bank Indonesia’s regulation to develop the national payments ecosystem.

Currently, the partnership is focused on processing and managing debit card transactions within Indonesia. In the future, the partnership may scale to include processing transactions across other digital payments environments, such as e-commerce. By bringing together both Artajasa’s local expertise and Mastercard’s global footprint and technology, the companies say that the entire ecosystem stands to benefit.  Issuing banks gain access to the latest fraud and risk mitigation solutions while acquiring banks and merchants are enabled to decrease any incidence of fraudulent transactions. Most critically, through the use of the latest authentication technologies such as tokenisation, cardholders are incentivised to use their cards across payment channels, with peace of mind that their transactions are safe and secure.