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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">BCA’s new foray: Bank Central Asia (BCA) director Henry Koenaifi (right), accompanied by director Suwignyo Budiman, shows off a bank card that can be used for Internet transactions during the launch ceremony of the service in Jakarta on Tuesday. Antara/Rosa PanggabeanOne of the country’s banking giants, Bank Central Asia (BCA), advanced their breadth of services on Tuesday by launching their premier online payment service, called KlikPay, in response to positive growth in Internet usage and online shopping.

The bank has been known to pioneer various banking services, including being the first to introduce e-wallet payments through its Flazz card, as well as providing online and mobile banking services through its KlikBCA.

BCA director Suwignyo Budiman said that KlikPay was a service that would “ease online shopping”, which still revolved around traditional payment methods of cash transfers from buyers to merchants.

“People complain that this payment method is less practical,” he said during the launch of KlikPay in Jakarta.

As of now, there are around 50 million Internet users and the number is expected to rise as broadband infrastructure improves and Internet subscriptions become cheaper.

A Nielsen survey, however, shows that the top five online activities were still concentrated around social networking and email.

Observers point out that online shopping in Indonesia is not yet pervasive due to a number of factors, including the low penetration of desktops, through which e-commerce sites were viewable and the absence of a reliable, widely-used online payment system.

“That is why BCA is launching this new product that would act as a tool for online shopping,” Suwigno noted.

Ina Suwandi, funding and services business head of the bank, explained that the KlikPay service would be accessible to BCA account holders who have signed up for individual KlikBCA and BCA credit cards.

“KlikPay offers ease to account holders by providing two methods of payment, via account debits or credit card payments,” she said.

She added that, with access to KlikPay facilities, account holders must register for the service through the bank’s website and activate the service once the person has received a code the bank sent via text message.

Once activated, the person can start shopping at selected merchants.

“We have collaborated with five merchants, Bhinneka.com, Blibli.com, CBN, LivingSocial and Gu-dangVoucher.com,” she said, adding that the bank planned to expand their merchant list to 40 this year.

There are no official statistics on the number of online merchants, but a cursory search on Google would show more than 15 thousand search results.

The bank however, has no plans yet to link small, individual merchants to the system unless they were aggregated under a larger market place because “the substantial effort” of this undertaking.

Individual merchants could be found in community forums and Facebook, selling wares from mobile phone cases to tablet computers.

“Here, security falls under attention,” she said, adding that the bank would require users to undergo a three-step security method to deflect fraud.

KlikPay users would be issued a user identification and password, which they must enter before they finalize online payments, she said.

Then, she added, the user must enter a one-time password (OTP), which the bank would send via text message to the user’s mobile phone number. Only after the user has submitted this unique password would the transaction be processed, she pointed out.

“The password can only be used once at the designated merchant and cannot be used by another merchant the next time,” she explained.

KlikPay, she added, also made transactions more secure for merchants because the system would verify whether buyers had sufficient funds for the purchase.

Santoso, BCA general manager for credit cards, said that KlikPay’s potential rested in the bank’s customer base of approximately 9 million people saving accounts and roughly 2 million credit cards.

Only 142 thousand of these credit cards, however, or less than 10 percent, were used for local and international online purchases.

“With the percentage base and the readiness and willingness of merchants to sell and make transactions online, we have set a conservative target of 250,000 [credit card] transactions,” he said, regarding this year’s target.

Ina added that the target would rise to 500,000 transactions when topped off by the number of KlikBCA users.

Hendrik Tio, managing director of Bhinneka.com, said that linking up with KlikPay services would increase their e-commerce site’s trustworthiness, as the site would have been verified by BCA.

“People would feel more at ease at our online shopping site and this would induce them to increase their shopping at our site,” he said.