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ajor lenders '€” Bank Central Asia (BCA), Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) and Bank Mandiri '€” are on track to comply with the central bank'€™s regulation that will require the use of a six-digit personal identification number (PIN) for credit card transactions, their senior executives said.

The regulation, which was issued by Bank Indonesia (BI) in 2012, stipulated that all credit card-issuing banks must implement the six-digit PIN by Dec. 31, 2014 at the latest for all credit card transactions.

The central bank claims that the use of PINs will provide higher security for customers during each transaction.

At the moment, the use of PIN is only required for cash advances at ATMs, while other transactions still use a customer'€™s signature for validation.

BCA senior credit card general manager Santoso said that BCA had developed a new system that would enable the bank to implement the new PIN.

'€œWe are conducting tests right now to allow customers to change their existing PINs at ATMs. We expect to complete the tests in late August,'€ Santoso said, adding that the bank had more than 14,700 ATMs and had issued 2.5 million credit cards so far.

BCA '€” the biggest private lender and one of the banks with the largest credit card customer base '€” will then proceed with the reprogramming of its 300,000 electronic data capture (EDC) machines, according to Santoso.

It hopes to have reprogrammed 50 percent of its EDC units by December and finish the whole process by the middle of 2015.

'€œWe plan on issuing authentication codes simultaneously for all of our customers in November. Besides at ATMs, they can use the code to change their PINs on our website as well,'€ he said.

Meanwhile, BNI consumer product and retail division head Dodit Wiweko Probojakti said the state lender was currently in the process of upgrading the software of its EDC units, of which there are 68,000 units as of now.

He added that BNI had also started notifying its customers of the PIN requirement since March.
'€œWe send the information via emails and text messages and they have begun changing their PINs,'€ he said.

BNI has issued 1.65 million credit cards and new customers will already receive the six-digit PIN, according to Dodit. '€œWe will carry out a campaign in September to once again inform the customers of the change,'€ he said.

Similar to BNI, state-owned Mandiri has also begun informing its credit card customers of the PIN requirement for their future transactions and is now upgrading its EDC machines.

Mandiri consumer cards group head Boyke Yurista said that the bank has been distributing the new PINs since June. '€œBut we still have to educate the customers because they are not familiar with the use of PINs. That is our homework,'€ he said.

Currently, Mandiri operates more than 200,000 EDC units and has almost two million credit cards.

According to the latest data from BI, there are 23 credit card issuers at the moment, consisting of local and foreign banks. By the end of June the total number of credit cards stood at 15.32 million, which was a significant rise from the 9.15 million that existed in 2007.

In terms of transactions, credit card usage in Indonesia generated Rp 120.5 trillion (US$10.31 billion) in value in the first half of 2014, up 13 percent year-on-year, and was 66 percent higher compared to 2007.