Top-Up with Driver: Digital Money, Transactional Aspirations, and Peerhood in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

In this talk, I examine how digital ride-hailing apps in Indonesia, Gojek and Grab, have evolved from transport to a broader platform of financial services, including privately issued e-money, and how they advocate for the expansion of cashless peer-to-peer (P2P) payment systems. I focus especially on how their fleets of on-demand drivers are used to convert customers of the apps’ transport services, into customers of their financial services. I argue that these apps position users into new hierarchical exchange relationships, contradicting the flat, or symmetrical exchange relationship imagined in P2P transaction, while also minimizing the companies’ influence as intermediary. I further contend that this transactional constellation camouflages the financial interests that these companies have in generating platform activity. During six months of fieldwork in Yogyakarta, between 2018 and 2019, I explored these transactional dynamics by extensive use of the apps and by meeting both their drivers and customers, along with various fintech industry representatives and other local stakeholders. Through this work, I show that the exchange of digital money through these ride-hailing apps constitutes far more than the financial transaction and contains much more than can be summarized in an elegant acronym.