State-owned lender Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) hopes to expand its credit card customer base with support from the bank'€™s recent partnership with Japanese credit card firm PT JCB International Indonesia.

The partnership is expected to attract Japanese community members, employees of Japanese companies and users of Japanese brands in Indonesia, according to BNI card business division head Dodit Wiweko Probojakti.

BNI will act as the card issuer while JCB will serve as the principal.

BNI currently has 279 Japanese corporate clients with a total balance of around Rp 2.1 trillion (US$181.6 million), while individual customers from the world'€™s third-largest economy amounts to 2,711 with a total balance of almost Rp 1 trillion.

'€œThey are part of our target market,'€ Dodit said late on Wednesday.

He added that BNI aimed to issue at least 70,000 BNI-JCB cards within the next three years, with an average spending volume of between Rp 3 million and Rp 5 million per customer per month.

'€œHopefully we will be able to generate half a trillion rupiah from the business after three years,'€ Dodit said.

BNI'€™s credit cards account for 10.6 percent of the overall domestic credit card market, totaling 1.59 million credit cards as of the end of March 2014.

The bank'€™s credit card transactions volume reached 5.3 million in the first quarter of this year, with a total value of Rp 5.07 trillion.

Prior to the partnership with JCB, BNI had already established similar cooperation with MasterCard and Visa, which are American principals.

Dodit said that BNI would offer the new BNI-JCB cards to potential customers from the premium class, citing their high usage and relatively low risk.

About 140,000 of BNI'€™s current card holders are premium customers.

'€œDespite their low number, they actually made up almost 50 percent of our credit card spending volume last year,'€ he said.

JCB president director Yuichiro Kadowaki said that the partnership with BNI was part of the company'€™s effort to establish a more solid foothold in Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia.

JCB claims to have 83 million card members worldwide, including 20 million card members in China, South Korea and Taiwan.

'€œOur next target is Southeast Asia. Indonesia is the most important market in terms of economy and population, but we are still new in this,'€ Kadowaki said.

JCB currently partners with Bank Central Asia (BCA), Bank Internasional Indonesia (BII) and CIMB Niaga for the merchant business, and with BII for credit card issuance.

The number of merchants that accept JCB cards in Indonesia has more than tripled in the past three years from 50,000 in 2011 to 175,000 at present, according to Kadowaki.

'€œFor cards, we partnered with BII in 2012 and have about 14,000 platinum JCB cards issued already,'€ he added.

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