Major lenders Bank Mandiri, Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) and Bank Central Asia (BCA) are aiming for double-digit growth in the use of their prepaid cards, supported by new systems and new partnerships.

State-owned Mandiri expects both its transaction volume and value to climb by 30 percent on a year-on-year basis in 2015, according to its senior vice president for electronic banking Rahmat Broto Triaji.

With these targets, Mandiri expects volume to grow to 185.9 million transactions, with an estimated value of at least Rp 2.08 trillion (US$162.33 million) by year-end.

Rahmat said that part of that growth would come from the transportation sector, such as Transjakarta bus services, since passengers were now required to use prepaid cards as payment on all of its 12 corridors.

PT Transjakarta, the company in charge of the service, began implementing the policy as of Feb. 21. Prior to that, prepaid cards were acceptable on only a limited number of corridors. '€œIt helps to boost transactions when the use of prepaid card is made compulsory,'€ he said on Monday.

Mandiri senior executive vice president for transaction banking Rico Usthavia Frans added that its new top-up system was expected to boost the number of its circulated prepaid cards to 6.5 million this year, up from 5.2 million in 2014.

The system, which was introduced on Monday, enables cardholders to use their Android smartphones to top up their prepaid cards.

'€œIn the past, they had to visit our branches, ATMs or merchant partners to reload the cards. Now they just have to download a mobile phone application to do it,'€ he said.

The system also allows top-ups to occur using fund transfers from other banks. In the first phase, Mandiri has established partnerships with BNI, Bank Tabungan Negara (BTN), CIMB Niaga and Bank Mega.

It hopes PermataBank will join the partnership soon as talks between the two lenders are currently underway, according to Rahmat.

Meanwhile, BNI consumer product and retail division head Dodit Wiweko Probojakti said he was optimistic that BNI would be able to post double-digit growth in the number of its prepaid cards, along with transaction volume and value.

Last year, the state lender booked 112.844 transactions with a value of Rp 6.6 billion. At the same time, the number of its prepaid cards, named Tapcash, stood at 211,000.

'€œWe are going to venture into toll-road payment to boost our prepaid-card use, beginning with the Bali toll road this year,'€ Dodit said, adding that it had also started providing payment services for parking meters in the Sabang area of Central Jakarta.

Dodit said the lender would also make use of upcoming annual events '€” such as the Java Jazz festival and Inacraft fair '€” to promote Tapcash use.

As with Mandiri, lender BCA also hopes to achieve 30 percent growth in its prepaid card business.

One way to do that, according to BCA senior credit card general manager Santoso, is to diversify the design of its Flazz prepaid card. '€œApparently new designs attract more users and some of them have begun collecting the cards,'€ he said in a telephone interview.

At present, BCA has 6.8 million cards circulating. They generated around Rp 450 billion in transactions last year.

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