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ublicly listed lender PT Bank CIMB Niaga has become state-owned pension insurance firm PT Taspen'€™s paying agent, seeking to obtain more customers from the partnership and increase its pension fund'€™s investment portfolio to Rp 8 trillion (US$670,57 million) within the next five years.

CIMB Niaga president director Arwin Rasyid said the partnership would help his company increase its pension fund customers by 5 percent.

'€œWe have approximately 2.8 million customers and out of that we have only 13,400 pension fund customers,'€ he told reporters on Thursday on the sidelines of the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between CIMB Niaga and Taspen.

'€œPT Taspen manages pension funds of more than 2.4 million people. We hope to get 120,000 new pension costumers, constituting 5 percent of its total customers,'€ he said.

Arwin said the additional 5 percent of pension costumers would boost CIMB Niaga'€™s pension fund investment portfolio by 1,000 percent to Rp 8 trillion from the current Rp 800 billion in the next three to five years.

'€œI am sure that PT Taspen will help us to accomplish this because it has around 12,000 pension fund service points throughout Indonesia, definitely more than CIMB Niaga, which only has around 1,000 service points throughout the country,'€ he said, adding that currently some 8,000 of Taspen customers had become CIMB Niaga'€™s customers.

CIMB Niaga, according to Arwin, will seek additional pension fund customers through various marketing strategies.

PT Taspen director Iqbal Latanro, meanwhile, said that in order to attract more people to become pension insurance clients, companies needed to make it easier for them to manage their financial services.

'€œPaying agents have to think about how they are going to make it easier for customers to get their pension funds. They also have to think about how to make pension fund services accessible throughout Indonesia,'€ he told a press conference.

CIMB Niaga, Arwin said, tried to find ways to make it easier for people to manage their pension funds.

Arwin mentioned CIMB Niaga'€™s cellular phone-based bank account locally known as rekening ponsel, which allowed customers to make transactions by using their cell phones, as part of CIMB Niaga'€™s efforts to attract new customers.

'€œSo far, some 250,000 of our customers have used the cellular phone-based bank accounts since it was launched in March and we set our sights on having 300,000 phone-based bank account users by the end of this year. Pension fund customers can also use this application,'€ he said.

According to Arwin, the company could expand its cooperation with Taspen to other areas, such as fund management and credit facilities for retirees.

Currently Taspen has 2.4 million customers receiving pension funds each month amounting to Rp 5 trillion. The payment is done through the company'€™s 12,865 service points and eight paying agents throughout Indonesia. (ogi)