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rivate lender Bank Internasional Indonesia (BII) '€” part of Malaysia'€™s Maybank Group '€” has begun revamping its global banking in an attempt to improve its credit quality and profitability, its executives have said.

BII president director Taswin Zakaria said the bank had shifted its global banking business to focus on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other top-tier firms.

'€œThis is part of our business re-profiling. By focusing on these companies, we hope to see an improvement in our asset quality,'€ he said on Friday, after the bank'€™s annual general shareholders meeting.

He added that BII had also implemented a new credit assessment and approval system, and that it had started to intensify its asset-recovery efforts.

Last year, BII posted a significant decline in its net profits due to an increase in non-performing loans (NPLs), many of which came from the global banking segment. Its consolidated gross NPL ratio rose to 2.2 percent from 2.1 percent.

According to its consolidated financial report, the top five contributors to its increase in bad debts were the trading, business services, agriculture, transportation and construction sectors.

BII increased the allocation of its loan impairment to Rp 1.4 trillion (US$108.02 million) from Rp 1.05 trillion and, as a result, its consolidated net profits dropped by more than half to only Rp 698.52 billion in 2014.

'€œWe allocated the largest amount of provisions to the global banking segment. A lot of this figure was related to structured trade and commodity financing,'€ Taswin said.

BII finance director Thilagavathy Nadason also maintained the bank'€™s conviction that it would see increased profitability this year.

'€œWe are looking forward to this intensified asset recovery, which we hope will work to our advantage. We are looking to maintain our NIM [net interest margin] at the current level as well because funding competition this year is not as intense as in 2014,'€ she said.

The consolidated NIM figure stood at 4.8 percent as of December, falling from 4.9 percent just a year ago due to rising costs of funds.

BII now expects to enjoy more robust business in the second half, with an overall business growth target set at 15 percent year-on-year.

BII'€™s newly appointed global banking director, Eri Budiono, said it had already received a number of global banking loan applications, most of which had a potential success rate of higher than 50 percent.

'€œWe are in the middle of reviewing our corporate banking business plan, but it will take some time before we begin to feel the effect [of the business focus shift],'€ he said.

Meanwhile, the publicly listed bank '€” whose shares are traded under the BNII code on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) '€” is mulling a possible securities issuance to generate long-term funding.

The issuance will be a response to Bank Indonesia'€™s (BI) upcoming new policy, which will provide more room for banks to raise funds other than from conventional sources such as third-party funds.

'€œWe can still sell Rp 2 trillion-worth of debt paper as part of our continuous bond-issuance plan, but we are still assessing market conditions and we would like to wait until the policy comes out before making a decision,'€ Nadason said.