- 18 hours ago
May 3, 2026
Indonesia capped ride-hailing commissions at 8% on May Day — a 60% drop in platform revenue per trip — while sovereign wealth fund Danantara simultaneously holds stakes in the companies bearing the shock. The state that sets the price is also a co-owner of the business that has to live with it. Miguel Santos and Chloe Tan join host Emily Chen to unpack why this is industrial policy, not labor policy; what the Pertamina model applied to platforms means for every FDI model in Southeast Asia; and why the 8% decree may paradoxically be the best thing that ever happened to GoPay and OVO. Trust Bank Singapore’s first monthly profit — achieved with no state co-ownership — provides the instructive counterpoint.
https://expertlinked.in/posts/2026-05-03-sea-weekly-the-8-percent-decree/
Indonesia capped ride-hailing commissions at 8% on May Day — a 60% drop in platform revenue per trip — while sovereign wealth fund Danantara simultaneously holds stakes in the companies bearing the shock. The state that sets the price is also a co-owner of the business that has to live with it. Miguel Santos and Chloe Tan join host Emily Chen to unpack why this is industrial policy, not labor policy; what the Pertamina model applied to platforms means for every FDI model in Southeast Asia; and why the 8% decree may paradoxically be the best thing that ever happened to GoPay and OVO. Trust Bank Singapore’s first monthly profit — achieved with no state co-ownership — provides the instructive counterpoint.
https://expertlinked.in/posts/2026-05-03-sea-weekly-the-8-percent-decree/
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00:05On May 1st, 2026, President Prabobo stood before tens of thousands of workers at Jakarta's
00:12National Monument and signed a decree cutting ride-hailing platform commissions from 20%
00:18to 8. The drivers had asked for 10. He gave them 8. That is not a rounding error. That
00:26is industrial policy. The platform's revenue per ride just fell 60%. And the entity that now holds
00:33stakes in the companies absorbing that shock is the same government that wrote the law. Indonesia
00:39just restructured the value capture of its entire platform economy without calling it nationalization.
00:45This week on SEA Weekly, we follow the money. Welcome to SE Weekly, the podcast analyzing the
00:53most significant developments in Southeast Asia's digital economy, industrial policy and financial
00:58infrastructure. I'm Emily Chen, and joining me today from Jakarta is Miguel Santos, SEA Weekly
01:05contributor covering industrial policy and capital markets. Miguel, welcome.
01:10Thanks, Emily. Good to be here.
01:11This is Episode 10, and we have a lot to get through. Miguel, give us the central thesis.
01:17Prabowo applied the Pertamina model to platforms. By making the Indonesian state simultaneously the
01:24regulator and the co-shareholder through Donantara, he changed what it means to invest in Southeast
01:31Asian tech. The investment thesis for Grab and Gotoh has to be rewritten, not because the companies
01:37are failing, but because the category they belong to has changed. And there's a fintech angle that makes
01:43this even more layered. When commission revenue collapses, financial services stops being a
01:49strategic side bet and becomes the only margin business left. GoPay and Ovo just had their product
01:56roadmaps written by a presidential decree. We also have a real-world control group this week.
02:02Trust Bank Singapore just became the first digital bank in the region to turn a monthly profit,
02:08with no state co-ownership required. The contrast is instructive.
02:12We will work through the unit economics of the decree, the Donantara dimension that most headlines
02:17missed, and the fintech pivot those implications force. Let's get into it.
02:25Okay, so let's start with what actually happened on May Day. Miguel, you were following this in real
02:32time from Jakarta. Set up the scene.
02:35Yeah, so May 1st, International Workers' Day, Prabowo shows up at the National Monument.
02:42Monas, in front of tens of thousands of workers. And he signs presidential regulation number 27,
02:492026, right there, at the rally, live. And he says, I'm translating loosely here,
02:56the drivers work hard, risking their lives every day. Company applicators ask for 20%.
03:02How can the drivers agree to that? And by applicators, he means the platforms?
03:08Right. Applicator. That's the Indonesian term for the app companies. Gojek, Grab. So the political
03:15framing was, it was completely unambiguous. He's casting this as workers versus apps. And the thing is,
03:23this wasn't a surprise exactly. Reuters had reported in January that this was being planned.
03:29Goto's public position at the time was that an 8% cap was not a viable solution. And then May
03:371st
03:37arrives. What were the driver associations actually asking for?
03:4110%. They'd been campaigning for a decade, essentially. Their formal demand from the major
03:47driver coalitions was a 10% commission cap. And Prabowo, he gave them eight. He outbid their own ask.
03:56He outbid the union. He outbid the union at a May Day rally. Raden Igunwikaksono,
04:03the driver association chair, described it as, he called it the puncak, the pinnacle of a decade-long
04:09campaign. And you could tell from his statement that they were, I mean, they got more than they
04:14asked for. So what do you say?
04:19Walk me through the actual math, because I think a lot of people see 8% and don't immediately grasp
04:27what that means in real money.
04:29Right. So let's use a concrete number. Typical Jakarta ride, maybe IDR 40,000. That's roughly $2.50
04:38U.S. Under the old structure, the platform keeps 20%. That's IDR 8,000 per ride. At 8%,
04:47they keep IDR 3,200. Same driver, same passenger, same route, same fare. Platform revenue per trip
04:56drops 60%. 60%. 60%. 60%. And that revenue, at 20%, funded everything. Driver acquisition subsidies,
05:07which are, they're enormous in a competitive market like Jakarta. Promotional discounts,
05:12insurance coverage, the technology layer. At IDR 3,200 per ride, the math for running all of that
05:19doesn't work the same way. Something has to give.
05:22And it's not just the commission cut, right? I was reading that the regulation also mandates
05:28full health and accident insurance, BPJS Cassetta, for all driver partners. So you're cutting
05:35platform revenue per ride by 60% and simultaneously adding a mandatory insurance obligation on top,
05:43both at once. Exactly. Double compression. The regulation says platforms are responsible
05:50for enrollment and coverage. The actual premium economics, who bears what in practice,
05:55that's going to be a negotiation. But the direction is clear. The platform's cost structure
06:01gets heavier exactly as per-trip revenue collapses.
06:05And what about driver classification? Because there's been this long-running debate about whether
06:10gig workers should be formal employees. Does this regulation settle that?
06:15It doesn't. Which is actually kind of remarkable. The regulation closes the insurance gap from the
06:21cost side. Drivers get BPJS coverage like formal employees. But it stops short of legally reclassifying
06:29them as employees. So you have this legal limbo where platforms carry employee-equivalent benefit
06:35obligations without the formal employment framework that would actually clarify everything.
06:40The classification debate is still ongoing, which means ongoing legal uncertainty on top of the
06:47economic shock. It's a very Indonesian solution. Deliver the outcome. Defer the classification question.
06:55What did the platform say publicly?
06:57Very measured. Grab Indonesia CEO Nenen Gonadi called it, um, a fundamental change to how digital
07:05platforms function as a marketplace. Goto CEO Hans Patuo pledged alignment, stressed ecosystem
07:13sustainability. Neither one gave anything like a concrete financial plan for making 8% work.
07:19Because they don't have one yet. Not publicly, anyway. What's not said is the real story.
07:25Exactly. What they left unsaid is what the financial logic now compels them to do. But before we get
07:32there, let me lay out the structural dimension that most of the coverage completely missed.
07:40Miguel, you flagged something in the piece that most of the Mayday coverage completely overlooked.
07:47The Danantara dimension. Walk us through it.
07:50Right. So, this is the structural detail that, I think, changes the whole picture. On the same day
07:57that the 8% decree was signed, Deputy House Speaker Sufmi Kasko Ahmad confirmed that Indonesia's
08:03sovereign wealth fund, Danantara, has already taken shareholdings in app-based transportation firms,
08:09specifically Gojek. And he added that Danantara is currently in negotiations to acquire a stake in
08:15Grab as well. So, let me just state that plainly. The government signed a regulation that cuts
08:22platform revenue per ride by 60% while simultaneously holding equity stakes in those platforms.
08:30That's the structure. And it gets more layered. Danantara is also reportedly in line for what's
08:36being called a golden share in the combined Grab-GoTo merger entity, which would give Jakarta
08:41what analysts have described as potential veto rights over critical decisions affecting Indonesian
08:47operations. Edward Gustley at Panida Capital Advisors put it directly. This reflects a broader global shift
08:54towards stronger state oversight of strategic digital assets. Explain Danantara for listeners who might not
09:01be familiar, because I think the name is appearing more and more, but people don't always know what
09:06it is. Danantara was launched in 2025, manages approximately U.S. $900 billion in state assets.
09:14It's Indonesia's sovereign wealth fund, but with an explicitly activist mandate, not passive investment.
09:20The goal is to channel state capital towards sectors the government deems strategic. And the model it
09:25follows, I wrote this in the piece, is what I call the Pertamina model. Pertamina, PLN,
09:32Telcom, these are the state enterprises that dominate Indonesia's oil and gas, electricity,
09:37and telecom sectors. In each case, the government doesn't own 100%. It owns enough, through shareholding,
09:45through regulation, through pricing authority, to determine the economics of the sector.
09:50That playbook has been running for decades, and now it extends to platform logistics.
09:55So Indonesia has done this before, in physical infrastructure?
10:00Yes, many times. The question has always been whether state ownership in those sectors produced
10:05better access or less efficient production. And the honest answer? Both, simultaneously.
10:12That tension is now arriving in digital logistics.
10:15The combined GrabGoto entity, what does that look like if the merger closes?
10:20About 90% of Indonesia's ride-hailing and food delivery market,
10:24combined valuation around US $29 billion. With Don and Tara holding veto rights embedded,
10:31it's not a company in the conventional sense of a privately owned competitive entity subject to
10:36market forces. It functions as a regulated utility, with private market branding and NYSE and
10:43Jakarta stock exchange listings.
10:48Chloe, you've been watching the institutional investor reaction to all of this from Singapore.
10:55Miguel just laid out the structural picture. Don and Tara co-ownership, 90% market share, golden share framing.
11:03What does that do to the investment thesis?
11:05It completely changes the question you have to ask. And the issue isn't, I mean, it's not whether
11:11this is good or bad for the platforms in some abstract sense. The issue is, do you know which
11:17thing you own? If you bought Grab as a high-growth tech company, and a lot of institutional investors did,
11:24at a high-growth tech multiple, and it becomes a regulated infrastructure concession,
11:29the valuation framework you applied was wrong. The multiple you paid was wrong. Utilities can be
11:36very attractive investments, right? Natural monopoly characteristics, predictable cash flows,
11:42all of that. But you have to know, up front, that that's what you're holding.
11:46How did the market actually respond when this started becoming clear? Because I expected more alarm.
11:54Yeah, this is the counterintuitive part. When Don and Tara's involvement in the Grab-Go-To
11:59Moja first leaked back in November 2025, Goto shares actually surged, 9.8% in a single day.
12:08The market read state participation as stabilizing, not threatening. Stabilizing how? Think about it from
12:16the downside risk perspective. A state that holds equity in the entity has a very strong incentive to
12:22ensure that entity doesn't fail, like spectacularly fail. You're not underwriting a startup that can go to
12:28zero. You're underwriting something the Indonesian government needs to demonstrate returns on,
12:33to parliament, to international creditors, to the Indonesian public. That's actually a form of
12:39more reassuring than the original pitch of we'll eventually find unit economics.
12:45But you've written about a tension underneath that stabilizing story.
12:49Yeah. So the risk isn't destruction. The risk is the tension between commercial priorities and social
12:56mandates. What happens when GoPay's product team wants to go up market into wealth management
13:02because the margins are significantly better? And Don and Tara's representative on the board says,
13:08our mandate is financial inclusion. What about the unbanked? Who wins that meeting? Does the board
13:14override the commercial team? Does the commercial team find workarounds? We genuinely don't know yet
13:20how that governance conflict resolves in practice. Does anyone know yet? Not publicly, no. And the
13:27implementation timeline is gradual was the government's word when the decree was signed. No start date. So
13:34the platforms have some runway. Goto and Grab can, you know, restructure the business model before the full
13:40weight of this lands. But the direction is set. You don't, you don't unsign a presidential decree
13:46signed at a May Day rally. No, you really don't.
13:53Miguel, before we get to the fintech implications, you drew a connection in the piece to a story that ran
14:00the day before the decree, the Philippines-Singapore carbon trading deal. Some listeners might wonder,
14:07what does that have to do with any of this? Right. So the connection is directed capital
14:13versus free capital. On April 30th, the day before the decree, the Philippines and Singapore signed an
14:20implementation agreement for bilateral carbon trading under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement,
14:26Philippines' first such bilateral deal, Singapore's 11th globally. What they built is a framework that
14:33specifically channels cross-border capital toward national climate policy objectives, not open market
14:40investment on whoever's terms, directed flows structured by treaty. Same logic as Donantara,
14:47different domain. Exactly. States building frameworks that say capital can come in, but on these terms,
14:54toward these outcomes. And when you look at it across the region, Vietnam is building state
14:59proximity into crypto exchange licensing, the Philippines is formalizing state supervision
15:04in climate finance. The Indonesia platform decree is the most dramatic example because the numbers are
15:10so concrete and the companies are so visible. But it's not, it's not an outlier. It's part of a coherent
15:16regional shift in how governments think about capital and technology. And the pattern is spreading.
15:22Right. And this is why I think the FDI recalibration is bigger than just go to or grab specifically.
15:29If you're running a Southeast Asia investment model built in, say, 2021, when the dominant assumption was
15:35convergence toward liberal open market rules, those assumptions are almost certainly wrong now. The
15:41terms have changed. You need to account for directed capital dynamics in every market in this region,
15:47not just Indonesia. That is a significant recalibration. Let's turn to what this means
15:54for the platforms themselves and specifically for the fintech layer.
16:01Chloe, you said something in the preview notes that I want to unpack. You said the 8% decree might
16:09be
16:09the best thing that ever happened to GoPay and OVO. That is a counterintuitive claim. Walk me through it.
16:16It is counterintuitive. And I'll say up front that I find it a little uncomfortable to frame it that way
16:22because drivers just want a real fight. But from a platform financial strategy perspective,
16:29what the 8% cap does is eliminate the ambiguity. The ambiguity about what?
16:35About whether financial services are the main event or a side bet. For years,
16:40GoPay and OVO have been described as strategic investments, important, promising, but ultimately
16:47satellite to the core transportation business. When your core business generates 20% commission on
16:54tens of millions of rides per month, financial services is a nice-to-have, a growth optionality
17:00story you tell to investors. When your core business generates 8% commission, and you've just been
17:06handed a mandatory insurance cost on top, financial services is no longer optional. It becomes the
17:13only remaining margin business. What does that financial services layer actually look like for
17:19these two platforms specifically? GoPay is Gotoh's payment arm. It processes hundreds of millions of
17:25transactions annually, merchant acceptance, QR payments, consumer credit, insurance products. OVO,
17:32which is backed jointly by Gotoh and Grab, is Indonesia's largest e-wallet by transaction volume.
17:38Then there's lending to micro and small merchants, B2B treasury, consumer investment products.
17:43These are businesses with genuinely attractive unit economics. Higher margins, stickier customer
17:49relationships, better data assets than ride hailing. They can carry the load. But, but, building that
17:56layer to the point where it actually replaces ride commission revenue requires years of sustained,
18:02unglamorous execution. Product depth, regulatory licensing for each financial product, customer
18:09trust built slowly, AI automation to keep the cost to serve down, and all of that execution now has to
18:16happen with Don and Tara watching, possibly with a seat at the board table. The governance conflict is real.
18:22Don and Tara's mandate is social welfare and financial inclusion. If your fintech team says,
18:28let's push into high net worth wealth management because the margins are better,
18:32and Don and Tara's representative says, but what about the unbanked? That conflict plays out across
18:38every major product decision for years. And we don't know yet how it resolves.
18:42That ambiguity is itself a risk. Exactly. We don't know if Don and Tara is a passive financial investor
18:49or an active strategic director. The answer shapes everything. This is exactly where Trust Bank becomes
18:56a useful data point. Just hit monthly profitability. First digital bank in Singapore to do it.
19:02March 2026, just over three years after launch, they opened in September 2022. Beat all four of their
19:10digital bank peers in Singapore to the milestone. Over 1 million customers, $900 million in loans
19:16dispersed in 2025. Revenues grew 39% year-on-year, while costs fell 7%. And what drove the cost reduction?
19:24AI automation, primarily. Trust CEO Dwaipayan Sadhu has talked about their Gen.AI chatbot that now
19:31handles close to 50% of all customer service interactions end-to-end. No human escalation. And
19:38on the revenue side, 70% of new customers came from referrals. That is an astonishingly efficient
19:44acquisition engine. No paid acquisition subsidy. Just product quality and word of mouth amplified
19:50by Fairprice Group's existing customer base. So, standard chartered banking DNA plus Fairprice
19:57retail distribution plus AI-first operations. That's the recipe. And no state co-ownership,
20:03no commission cap backstory, no regulatory mandate to simultaneously serve as a social safety net.
20:10Standard chartered and Fairprice are private sector partners with fully commercial incentives.
20:15They built what they could build on those terms, and it worked. But, and this is important,
20:21Singapore and Indonesia are operating in completely different political and social contexts. Proboa is
20:27governing 270 million people, massive inequality, a gig economy that employs millions of workers. Trust
20:34Bank operates in a city-state with per capita income eight or nine times higher. So,
20:39the question isn't which model is better. It's which model is viable in which context.
20:45Goto and Grab have to find their version of that path, but on much more constrained terrain.
20:51Right. 8% commission, mandatory insurance, Donantara governance. And yet, the uncomfortable
20:58irony is that this might actually work out for them in the very long run. If Goto and GoPay can
21:04successfully build Indonesia's dominant embedded financial services platform, lending, insurance,
21:10investment, merchant finance, understate protection from competitive disruption,
21:14that's a genuinely durable business. The Pertamana analogy works both ways. Pertamana is criticized for
21:21inefficiency. It's also been the anchor of Indonesia's energy economy for half a century.
21:26That is a long time horizon. It is. The drivers at MONAS are celebrating today. The answer to whether
21:33this produces sustainable, innovative platforms or slow, stable, undifferentiated utilities,
21:38that takes considerably longer to see. What are the near-term signals listeners should watch?
21:44Two things. First, the implementation timeline. The government said gradual, no start date. Watch for
21:50when Goto and Grab announce actual operational changes. If they move fast, they've modeled this
21:56and have a plan. If they delay, they're hoping for renegotiation. Second, watch the product
22:02announcements. If GoPay and OVO push into wealth management, SME lending, embedded insurance at
22:08scale over the next 6-12 months, the platforms understood what just happened. If the product roadmaps
22:14stay centered on transportation optimization, they haven't fully processed the shift yet. And also watch the
22:20merger outcome. If it closes with Don and Tara holding a golden share, you have a public-private
22:25utility with about $5 billion in combined cash and 90% market share. Very different animal from where we
22:32started. That's your signal. We'll be watching.
22:37That is SEA Weekly for the week of May 3rd, 2026. Indonesia's President Prabowo signed a decree on May Day
22:45capping ride-hailing platform commissions at 8%, a 60% reduction in per-trip revenue, while Danantara,
22:53the sovereign wealth fund, simultaneously holds stakes in the companies that must absorb that shock.
22:59The state that sets the price also owns a share of the business that has to live with it.
23:04The non-obvious read, as Miguel Santos laid on in our earlier segments, is that this is not labor policy.
23:11It is industrial policy. The Pertamina model applied to digital platforms. For every investor
23:18building a Southeast Asia exposure model, the terms have changed since 2021. For the platforms
23:24themselves, the financial services layer stops being a strategic bet and becomes the only remaining
23:30margin business. GoPay and Ovo just had their product roadmaps written by a presidential decree.
23:36Trust Bank in Singapore showed this week that digital banking profitability is achievable from
23:41a standing start in three years. The question is whether GoTo and Grab can find that same path on
23:48considerably more constrained terrain, and whether Danantara's governance structure helps them get
23:53there or complicates it. Miguel's full industrial policy analysis, Chloe's fintech implications breakdown,
24:00all primary sources and links to the complete article are in this week's SEA Weekly post.
24:06If this episode helped you see why the Danantara dimension changes the FDI calculus,
24:11share it with someone still reading the 8% cap as only a labor story. Subscribe to SEA Weekly on
24:17Spotify,
24:18Apple Podcasts, and LinkedIn, and find us weekly. See you next week from Singapore.
24:30Have a great weekend.
24:33George
24:33No
24:33You
24:33No
24:33No
24:34You
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