Erik Rivai Ridzal is Founder and President Director of Jatis Mobile, a technology company under Indivara Group focused on enterprise messaging, chat commerce, and AI-powered communication solutions. He’s best known for building one of Indonesia’s leading digital communications companies, but the more compelling story lies in how he navigated the journey and the valuable leadership insights he gained along the way. With a foundation in banking and decades spent guiding organizations through technological disruption, Erik’s career is defined by thoughtful, calculated strategic moves aimed at long-term sustainable growth.
From Banking to Building a Technology Company
Erik started his career at Standard Chartered Bank, serving as a Manager from 1990 to 1996. He entered via its management trainee program before moving into setting up priority banking and credit card operations.
Following this, he joined Bank Bali, where he served as Chief General Manager from 1996 to 2000. During this time at the company, at thirty years old, he was entrusted with project director responsibilities for a re-engineering project. This initiative successfully reduced the bank’s account-opening times from thirty days down to two hours, significantly improving its operational efficiency.
That project also led to broader electronic channels modernization, including contributions to one of Indonesia’s first online payment systems and a push to modernize ATM services to compete more aggressively with larger banks. Following a major operational restructuring at the bank in 2000, the banking sector Erik had built his career in changed rapidly. Out of that disruption came an opportunity: joining a small technology company in its earliest days, leaving behind a team of 250 to run business development alone out of a split-level office that housed barely a dozen people. That was the moment Erik joined Jatis Solutions as Business Director.
“Make Money Once, Earn From It Again and Again”
He brought one belief with him from banking, and it became the philosophy that shaped everything the company built afterward. “As a banker, you want to make money once and earn from it again and again,” he explains. The credit-card logic of recurring revenue, applied to a business that, at the time, was still thinking in one-off projects. That single idea pushed the young company toward recurring models years before that logic was common in Jakarta’s tech scene, and it remains the foundation of how the company operates today.
In 2002, watching telecom revenue climb faster than nearly any other sector, Erik with a small founding team helped spin off a new company to chase it, the company that would become Jatis Mobile.
Building a Business That Could Endure
The early years moved fast. Ringtones, leveraging relationships Erik had built with major record labels during his banking career. Then came interactive mobile quiz games, which struggled in their first version. The questions were too difficult, built for the sharpest users rather than for everyone. Then, the team rebuilt the product around accessibility instead of cleverness, and it became one of the company’s early breakout successes.
Ringback tones came next, quickly becoming one of the company’s strongest consumer offerings. However, what proved most enduring was a quieter, parallel venture: an enterprise B2B messaging business. Anchored by a major banking partnership in 2003, this foundational business steadily expanded to serve corporate clients across more than twenty industries.
Owning AI as Infrastructure, Not Trend
Erik saw the potential of AI as early as 2016. Two years later, he turned that foresight into action by tasking one of his top engineers to dive deep into AI full-time, building technical muscle long before the market caught on.
Driven by a clear ambition to establish Jatis Mobile as Indonesia’s premier local champion, Erik took a decisive step in March 2024 by completely reshaping the company’s structure. He appointed a Chief AI Officer to lead specialized engineering units across core engine development, mobile, and operations, putting AI at the heart of the business and bringing all strategic initiatives directly under his oversight.
Following a rigorous evaluation of global AI models to find the optimal balance between high performance and cost efficiency, Erik gathered employees from across the country in August 2025 to mark a major milestone: Jatis Mobile’s official debut as an AI company.
The SEJATI Way
Jatis Mobile internal culture framework spells SEJATI, which translates to “genuine” in English, and Erik treats it as a guiding principle to lead Jatis Mobile.
- S: Service Excellence comes first, because he sees the relationship with clients as the literal source of the company’s livelihood. “Your business is entrusted to you through your clients,” he says.
- E: Efficiency and Effectiveness means being thoughtful with cost while still maximizing impact.
- J: Jaringan (network) reflects the belief that runs through Erik’s skill/network/power framework: that strong relationships, both inside the company and across the industry, are an asset built deliberately, not a natural result of doing good work.
- A: Asik is about being enjoyable to work with and easy to connect with. For Erik, this isn’t just a personality trait, it’s the engine behind a strong network. “If people don’t enjoy your company, it’s hard to build real friendships or do business together,” he explains. Whether it’s sharing a good laugh or bonding over a game of golf or football, creating genuine, enjoyable connections is what makes people want to meet again and again.
- T: Tangguh (resilience) grounds the entire culture. He defines ‘battle-tested’ as the ability to withstand pressure and stay strong under trial. “How do you become battle-tested? You face the hits every day until you can take them,” Erik notes. For him, staying in the fight and pushing through hardship is what transforms adversity into lasting capability.
- I: Integrity and Innovation. These two are inseparable. Integrity means absolute transparency: “If someone is brilliant but lacks integrity, you let them go immediately. No exceptions,” Erik says. But it also takes willingness to face realities, which drives Innovation. He views true innovation not as chasing trends, but as the hard, invisible backend work required to actually keep your promises to clients.
That belief extends to how Erik thinks about developing the next generation of talent. He observes that while younger professionals have been surrounded by technology from day one, navigating endless information makes it difficult to pinpoint their core strengths and stay focused. In his view, leadership is about bridging that gap. “As leaders, we have to show them what delivering real results looks like,” Erik explains. “Success isn’t about one single trick; it’s about building a robust ecosystem. People are our primary engine, but to succeed, they must be equipped with skill sets, strong networks, power, and a deep culture of SEJATI.”
A Legacy Still Being Written
Looking back on his journey, Erik’s approach to leadership comes down to one core principle: sustained success isn’t built on temporary trends or shortcuts, but on a strong, adaptable ecosystem. Through shifting markets, technological evolutions, and industry disruptions, what endures is the discipline to keep learning, the commitment to nurturing people through SEJATI, and the determination to build solutions that deliver real results.