Building MaruPay: Empowering the Unbanked with Digital Access
Over the past few months, my teammate and I have been working on something we’re proud to finally share—MaruPay, a PPOB (Payment Point Online Bank) app designed to help unbanked communities access digital products with ease.
In Indonesia, many people still face barriers when it comes to accessing financial services. Through MaruPay, we aim to bridge that gap—not just by offering top-up services, bill payments, and digital purchases, but also by supporting our local agents to grow and scale their micro-businesses.
We’re a small team of two, but we wear many hats. I’ve been leading the development and product management side—handling everything from defining the roadmap, prioritizing issues, building the backend/frontend features, to setting up performance tracking.
Meanwhile, my teammate has been focusing on design and marketing—shaping the user experience and growing our user base through targeted promotions.
Despite having full-time jobs, we’ve managed to move efficiently by using Notion to track our progress and tasks, and Metabase to monitor key product metrics. These tools help us stay aligned, make data-informed decisions, and iterate quickly based on real user behavior.
We officially launched three months ago (March 2025), and it’s been both exciting and humbling to see the response. So far, 100+ users have joined our platform. It might be a small number, but for us, it’s a strong signal that we’re solving a real need.
More than just building an app, this project has also been a chance for both of us to apply our professional skills in a meaningful way—outside of our daily work environments.
We’re continuously learning, improving, and listening to feedback from our users and agents. Our vision for MaruPay is to become a trusted, go-to app for digital payments—especially for those who have traditionally been left out of the financial system.
Thanks for following our journey—more updates soon! And if you’re interested in learning more or collaborating, feel free to reach out.