Markus Prommik is the co-founder and CEO of Finfra, a fintech platform that develops white-labeled lending products to help non-fintech companies integrate financial services into their platforms. 

Finfra has since raised over $1M in funding and acquired a permanent Indonesian fintech license.

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👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

Finfra enables digital platforms in the B2B e-commerce, agritech, logistics industries (and more)  to provide credit to their customers at the time of a transaction. 

We bring financial services to users at the time when they most need them. 

In other words, we’ve built a sophisticated lending platform that’s fully compatible with Indonesia’s financial regulations and can be rolled out by any company with their own branding. 

This saves companies thousands of hours and quite a few millions of dollars that would otherwise go into developing their own lending platforms and ensuring regulatory compliance. 

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🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

Although Finfra is based in Indonesia and already looking to expand elsewhere in Southeast Asia, I’m actually not from the region. 

My roots are in the Baltics: I grew up in Estonia and studied at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. 

During my undergraduate studies, I spent a semester as an exchange student in Hong Kong and traveled around Southeast Asia a bit later. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for at the time— enlightenment, maybe?—but what I found was an incredible opportunity for forward-thinking fintech due to the widespread underbanking issue. 

I relocated to Jakarta a year later, and I’ve been here ever since. 

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🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

It was a long and winding road to get Finfra off the ground, so achieving that is probably what I’d consider the biggest highlight of my career. 

My entrepreneurial journey started in earnest in 2016 when I co-founded a consumer lending company called Danabijak. 

During the five-year process of attaining the permanent fintech lending license within Indonesia, we’ve gone through COVID-19 (which was a horrible shock for lending platforms in the region), and we’ve dealt with difficult, aggressive, and well-funded competition.

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🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

Particularly in Southeast Asia, fintech has made enormous strides in terms of servicing historically underbanked populations and businesses. 

We’re seeing a real paradigm shift as customer relationships and trust move away from traditional financial institutions and toward the brands they interact with daily, like Tokopedia, Shopee, Gojek, and Grab. 

The push towards super apps has done more than anything else to enable this. Brands are doing the smart thing by leveraging this loyalty and their unique datasets to offer financial products and monetize with better terms and value propositions.

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💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry? 

Thinking big is great, but zeroing in on a specific focus is better. Finfra has been successful because we have been incredibly deliberate. We designed a very specific product to meet the very specific needs of a region and its market. 

We didn’t try to reinvent the wheel, and we certainly didn’t try to sell it to the entire world. Pick a market and let its individual needs enhance and impact your product. It’s much easier to widen the scope and focus of your product than to try and narrow it after the fact.

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🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours? 

Oh, I can get chatty about all sorts of things—pretty much everything, actually! 

But it really depends on who I am speaking with. I prefer to surround myself with people smarter than me, so the conversation really varies based on what they're into, their expertise, and what they're passionate about.

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🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show? 

The Peaky Blinders.

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🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Nothing beats childhood memories: plombir ice cream. It's a type of vanilla ice cream, but much denser and with the addition of cream—a very popular treat in Eastern European countries.

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FYI. We've edited this interview for clarity.