Hendra Kwik remembers accompanying his parents to their clothing shop in Jambi. Years passed. He left for university. The business remained much as he had known it as a child. His father had never learned how access to capital might help the store expand. The family worked; the possibilities stayed narrow. For a future fintech founder, it was an education that arrived before the degree.
The familiar startup question is how to persuade someone to try something new. Kwik encountered an earlier question: how does someone get within reach of the opportunity at all? A shopkeeper may have customers, experience and a reason to grow. None of those automatically produces a useful financial connection. The distance between ambition and a bank can be measured in more than kilometers.
Today, the Jakarta-based co-founder and Group CEO of Fazz works across Indonesian financial services and Singapore-based digital payment infrastructure. His vocabulary has expanded to include stablecoins and regional partnerships. The old shop remains a useful way into his thinking. The customer he describes is often someone trying to make an ordinary transaction work, with little spare time for the finance industry’s ambitions.
The ticket came before the company
Kwik studied chemical engineering at Institut Teknologi Bandung, graduating in 2012. Before Payfazz, he worked for oilfield services company Schlumberger, then joined Kudo, where he led growth. That route matters: he had experience of both an engineering workplace and the practical business of reaching customers through an agent network. Finance was a problem he approached after other kinds of work.
His university years already contained a rehearsal for asking strangers to back an improbable plan. He wanted to attend Harvard Model United Nations. To pay for it, he tutored, took assistant jobs and sold food. After a year, he had saved seven million rupiah against an estimated cost of twenty to twenty-five million. He contacted alumni for help.
Close to departure, the arithmetic grew more awkward: a ten-million-rupiah plane ticket, six hundred thousand rupiah in hand, four days to pay. He eventually made the trip, and his team won an award. After returning, he offered to return the remaining donations. An airline, regrettably, does not accept determination as a payment method. He had to find actual people prepared to close the gap.
The episode gives the later fundraising story a human scale. Before he was pitching a financial technology business, he was explaining why a student should be able to get on a plane. Both required a clear request, patience and someone willing to answer.
The neighborhood was already a network
In 2016, Kwik co-founded Payfazz with Ricky Winata and Jefriyanto. The business connected people outside the conventional banking system with financial institutions through local agents. By March 2019, its publicly described reach was around ten million people. Behind that number was a deliberately familiar point of contact: the small store.
A warung is woven into everyday Indonesian life. It can be a convenience shop, a place to eat, a family business. Payfazz gave these stores a digital connection for services such as mobile top-ups and money transfers. A customer could deal with a nearby shopkeeper while technology handled the transaction behind the counter. The interface included a person.
Kwik’s return from Brazil supplied a smaller irritation that helped sharpen the idea. Recharging his mobile phone in Indonesia was difficult. A service that should have been routine became a prompt to think about what shops could distribute. The same local presence that sold phone credit could become an access point for other financial products.
There is an appealing economy in that choice. Building an entirely new habit asks a great deal of a customer. Adding a useful service to a place they already visit asks less. A neighborhood store has its own relationships and rhythms. Software can extend what happens there without requiring every customer to become an expert in software. The shopkeeper becomes part of the explanation, as well as part of the transaction.
A reply, a spare office, a partnership
Payfazz’s early expansion met a limit that enthusiasm could not negotiate away: licensing. Kwik recalled the central bank stopping its consumer payments activity because it lacked an e-money license. The company shifted toward serving merchants and agents while trying to earn revenue and obtain the permissions it needed. A payment product could be popular and still have unfinished institutional work.
When Y Combinator invited the team to interview, Kwik sought help from another YC founder. Tianwei Liu, who had founded Singapore payments company Xfers, answered his email. On Kwik’s fundraising visit to Singapore, Liu offered his office as a place to stay. They talked through pitches, investors and the difficulty of keeping a young company alive.
Liu eventually invested personally. Their friendship began with practical assistance: a reply, somewhere to sleep, introductions. Kwik recalled spending two weeks pursuing fifty thousand dollars, then securing an offer of one and a half million after a two-hour meeting. Fundraising has a peculiar relationship with the clock; waiting can be longer than the decision.
Payfazz joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 batch. The program put the founders among other people building businesses, with access to knowledge and investors. Years later, the Singapore connection became part of Fazz itself. The company’s account of its origins places Kwik and Liu’s shared interest in financial access at the center of their decision to join forces.
The money got bigger. The question stayed small.
In March 2021, Payfazz and Xfers came together as Fazz Financial Group. Their combination brought an Indonesian agent network alongside Singapore payment infrastructure. Kwik had argued that expansion required people who understood the places where the company wanted to operate. A regional map alone could hardly supply that knowledge.
The September 2022 financing announcement put a larger number beside the project: a hundred-million-dollar Series C package. It comprised seventy-five million dollars in equity and a signed term sheet for a twenty-five-million-dollar debt facility. Those are different forms of financing, with different obligations. The headline amount was a company funding package, not a measure of Kwik’s personal wealth.
Fazz reported ten billion dollars in annualized transaction volume at that time. Transaction volume describes money moving through services; it is not company revenue. The distinction matters when a business exists to move other people’s money. A big throughput number is evidence of activity, while the customer’s interest is likely to be whether their own payment arrives.
Kwik’s stated ambition in that announcement was to give small businesses access to benefits available to larger companies. It is a useful test of the expanding group. More products and larger financing rounds should eventually become something understandable at the counter: a way to pay, receive money or fund a business. Otherwise, the numbers risk becoming rather expensive decorations.
The founder learns to leave the pitch
By 2022, Kwik described his leadership through a sporting progression. In a startup of up to fifty people, the founder was a player whose direct work could determine the outcome. At Series A, he needed to become a captain, helping the team perform. Beyond three hundred people and operations in other countries, he saw himself becoming a coach.
That final job demanded decisions about who belonged in which position. The founder could no longer take every task onto the field personally. This is a less glamorous achievement than announcing a financing round, but it has more to do with the daily shape of a company. A growing organization needs other people to exercise judgment without waiting for one person to finish everything.
“So that’s what I want to share with founders: focus on people.”
Hendra Kwik, 2021
Kwik offered that advice in 2021. He included investors and board members as well as employees: the people around a founder affect both decisions and execution. His account of fundraising was equally sober. Raising money brought another set of problems to solve, rather than an exemption from problems.
At a September 2022 panel, he urged founders to concentrate on a few activities customers would pay for and to align teams around meaningful growth measures. For Fazz, he pointed to payments and lending. The discipline fits the original shopkeeper’s problem. An enterprise needs a service useful enough to support a business, and a business sturdy enough to keep offering the service.
Across borders, back to the counter
In July 2025, Kwik discussed StraitsX as a way to improve the payment infrastructure behind Fazz’s services. He identified three familiar obstacles for underserved customers: difficult access, high fees and slow transactions. His interest in stablecoins followed those complaints. He wanted the infrastructure eventually integrated into the financial apps used by agents and rural customers.
The technology is a long way from a clothing shop in Jambi, but the intended benefit is easier to translate. Someone sending money wants it to arrive promptly and leave less behind in fees. A merchant wants a payment they can use. A new settlement system earns its place when those transactions become easier. The customer need not admire the machinery.
By December 2025, the group described four businesses: PayFazz for smaller shops, BillFazz for enterprises, Fazza for consumers and StraitsX for stablecoin infrastructure. Its work with Bank Danamon included payment connectivity through BI Fast and QRIS. Kwik wanted cooperation with bank partners to move faster. Even a business built around speed still needs other institutions to move with it.
At the start of 2026, he shared a colleague’s post about bringing Fazz’s financial applications and StraitsX’s infrastructure closer together. It was a statement of direction, with further plans ahead. His more specific public ambition remained the one he had explained the previous year: better infrastructure reaching the people using the apps.
The circle is pleasingly practical. Kwik left Jambi, trained as an engineer, worked abroad, asked for help in Singapore and built a group spanning different financial systems. Yet the scene that makes the project legible is still close to home: a person at a counter, asking to do something with their money. The question for every new layer of technology is whether that encounter gets simpler.