Jakarta. Ride-hailing app inDrive recently announced a partnership with risk intelligence company SHIELD to combat fraud.

Indonesia is the largest digital economy in Southeast Asia, hitting $77 billion in 2022, and is predicted to reach $130 billion by 2025, according to the economy SEA 2022 report. Online transportation has been among the key elements in the country's digital economy. The online transportation penetration rate reached 80 percent among urban digital users in 2022, and 75 percent of users are willing to use the same or more online transportation services in the next 12 months.

No wonder some new ride-hailing companies have entered the Indonesian market, offering unique service differentiations to challenge more established players, GOJEK and Grab. One of the new players is inDrive, which claims to be the world's fastest-growing online ride-hailing service, with the app already amassing 150 million downloads.

inDrive’s key differentiation is its unique people-to-people model and people's driven approach, allowing users to agree on a price that satisfies both parties. inDrive also offers transparency in that drivers can see the exact route before accepting and choose which rides to respond to. Likewise, passengers are free to select a driver they like. 

Besides, passengers pay drivers directly, allowing inDrive to reduce costs, maintain lower fares, and offer the lowest service fee in the market.

“What we do here is that our service fee to drivers is the cheapest in the market. It is sometimes two or three times cheaper than the big ones. So we deliver the same level of service or sometimes even higher, but for a much, much lower service fee. And that is what we call fighting injustice. Because we think the service fee, which the top players are charging, is unbelievably high,” Roman Ermoshin, Director of Ride-Hailing APAC at inDrive, said in a recent statement.

Moreover, unlike its top local competitors, inDrive does not burn money to grow. Ermoshin said inDrive did not give any special bonuses or incentives, but just charged a minimal service fee and told the drivers to play with the price to offer a fair service price within limits provided by the regulator.

“Our strategy is not to burn the money. Our strategy is to deliver the knowledge of the service that is good for everyone because it is transparent, easy, and affordable. It proves that we have been right from the very beginning because now we do not have any layoffs. We do not fire anyone when there have been quite a lot of layoffs in the past few months,” Ermoshin said.

To strengthen inDrive defenses against fraud and help it achieve the highest levels of trust, transparency, and fairness for drivers and passengers, inDrive has collaborated with SHIELD — the world’s leading risk intelligence company that combine AI and explainable machine-learning algorithms to help all online businesses stay ahead of new and unknown fraud.

SHIELD provides industry-leading risk intelligence, eliminating injustice and unfairness by ensuring that negotiations and prices are kept transparent and free from issues such as unwarranted price hikes. 

“SHIELD ID, the global standard for device identification, helps link fake devices created from the same physical device, which could number in the thousands. The SHIELD ID empowers inDrive to identify instances of many driver or passenger accounts being operated from the same device,” Imanuel Handjaja Ong, Director of SHIELD, said.

“At the same time, SHIELD’s AI technology can pinpoint large numbers of accounts tapping on the same IP address or subnet. This empowers inDrive to proactively deal with any fraudulent activity involving the use of fake accounts,” Handjaja Ong added.

SHIELD’s Device Intelligence will provide the driving force for inDrive to stay ahead of ride-hailing fraud syndicates worldwide, which often use fake accounts, which can be created with tools such as app cloners, with stolen identities or even by taking over legitimate accounts. 

SHIELD’s Risk Intelligence prevents fraud syndicates from creating fake accounts that can be used to complete ‘ghost riders” and rake-up ride completion incentives. SHIELD does it without needing Personal Identifiable Information (PII), ensuring that inDrive complies with data protection and privacy laws worldwide without compromising security.

“Our solution is integrated by an SDK and rests on inDrive's app. So, once you download inDrive apps, we will protect every device. It means every user that downloads the app is basically protected by our solution,” Handjaja Ong said.