“Having someone open his/her wallet for payment is a very rare moment by now,” said Ardhi Pradhana, the CFO of NAMA beauty, referring to the mass usage of e-money in this modern world at SBM ITB talks. Through his 15 years experience in the finance world and going abroad to more than 2 nations, Ardhi shares his thoughts about the phenomenon of digital money as it has already been a worldwide matter. Not only about the most common one like a card form money, but also the most up-to-date concept such as cryptocurrency was covered in SBM ITB Talks ep. 71
Related change in various industries
Most significant changes occur in business transactions, especially in the company-supplier relationship. Instead of seeing physical money move from one place to another, nowadays people merely see movement of numbers from an account to the supplier’s payment gateways. This cutting edge technology results in lower transaction cost, availability of business activity for 24/7, and even a cheaper fee for an international scale arrangement.
Is it safe?
Despite all the benefits from the implementation of digital money, the safety aspect left a big question mark for the whole system. According to Ardhi, the assurances of safeness are supposed to be dependent on each company involved in a transaction. Based on his experiences, only a few errors have occurred. Aside from that, the challenge actually takes place on how the responsible party can assure that every transaction using digital money represents the same amount of real money’s movement in the real world, such as in the form of cash.
Indonesia vs The World
In terms of User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX), Ardhi said that Indonesia is already one step ahead of many countries. From his two years of experience in the USA (2011 – 2013), he found that the majority of people there still using checks for business activity while Indonesia had already found the scanning payment system for mobile phones in the same time frame. However, Singapore seemed to be the leader at that time since most of his friends lived in that country have been able to do almost all kinds of transactions with their phones. Moreover, he also mentioned that the Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard (QRIS) may come out as a breakthrough for the whole world since there is already a rumor of QRIS acceptance in Thailand.
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
According to Ardhi, the plan of CBDC can be considered as a good movement whenever it is ready to be implemented since the usage in this digital currency means the efficiency cost of printing the paper money in a country, including Indonesia. However, back again, the safety aspect should be settled first beforehand otherwise this technology will only lead a nation into a disastrous financial problem, such as economic recession, and so on.