Founder Series: Vidit Agrawal, CEO and Co-Founder of GajiGesa
GajiGesa is the leading platform for employee benefits trusted by 200+ companies as of 2021. GajiGesa increases employee retention by reducing employees’ financial stress, offering earned wage access. Vidit Agrawal, GajiGesa’s CEO and co-founder, along with his team are actualizing the vision of providing financial wellness for Indonesian workers.
Can you tell us how you got the inspiration to build an Earned Wage Access platform in Indonesia?
GajiGesa was launched by my co-founder, Martyna who had been following the model of Earned Wage Access in Europe and US for a few years now. She started with the goal of improving the lives of blue collar workers and narrowed down on access to responsible capital as a key problem to solve. Martyna had seen multiple people struggle with loan sharks and pinjol in her decade long career in South East Asia and Indonesia and this inspired her to become an entrepreneur.GajiGesa has the vision to bring financial wellness for workers.
What does “financial wellness” mean to you and how do you plan to achieve that for Indonesian workers?
We at GajiGesa want to give an employee full control of their wages allowing them to use their earned salary whenever and wherever they need. In partnership with the employer, the GajiGesa app allows the worker to withdraw their earned salary at any time or use it to avail multiple services like purchases and bill payments. This provides responsible access to capital under the purview of their employer at a time of need.
How can your business model promote financial literacy to these workers?
Financial literacy is a key focus for GajiGesa. The app provides short learning modules and snippets on financial education to help workers plan their finances better. We also run offline and in-person learning sessions for workers with a focus on personal finance management. A lot of our future product development is also dedicated to financial education and literacy.
How do you see the EWA space in Indonesia change in the future as more and more players come in?
Indonesia has over 100M people who make less than 10M per month. The market is huge and we do not see it as a "winner take all" opportunity. Our focus continues to be the introduction of the concept and benefits of Earned Wage Access to employers across Indonesia. We have seen a wide acceptability of GajiGesa services by employers from various industries and we continue to grow at a very fast pace.
Are there any special plans/projects in mind for GajiGesa in 2022 that you can share to us?
Being true to our vision, in 2022 we will continue to build products with a focus on financial resilience and access to responsible capital for workers across Indonesia. Adding more features around financial literacy as well as awareness on savings is going to be some of the key projects we will work on thi year.