News & Events

The Firm is representing Ant Financial Services Group (“Ant Financial”) in connection with its strategic partnership with PT Elang Mahkota Teknologi Tbk (IDX: EMTK) (“Emtek”). The two companies are setting up a joint venture to launch a new mobile platform for payment and other financial services and to increase accessibility of digital financial services in Indonesia. 

The joint venture will leverage Ant Financial’s experience and know-how in mobile payment, digital financial innovations, risk control and cloud computing. The joint venture’s payment platform will be offered on BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), Indonesia’s most installed and most commonly used messenger application, which is operated by a subsidiary of Emtek, and has a user base of over 63 million monthly active users in the country. BBM has evolved from a pure messaging application (text and video) to a social eco-system unifying chat, social, commerce and services such as bill payments, top-up, vouchers/coupons, games, news, video, shopping and travel, which provides an immediate opportunity to offer payments services. Beyond serving BBM users, the joint venture will also offer its mobile payments technology to e-commerce, over-the-top (OTT) and online-to-offline (O2O) services, merchants and platforms in Indonesia to satisfy their increasing demand for tailored payment solutions.

The Simpson Thacher team includes Ian Ho, Erik Wang and Olivia Tang (M&A); and Lori Lesser and Marcela Robledo (Intellectual Property).