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ender Citibank Indonesia remains optimistic about its affluent customers as they continue to be the major growth drivers of its consumer banking business in the cooling economy.

According to Citibank'€™s country business manager for global consumer banking, Lauren Sulistiawati, the lender reaped satisfactory results in its consumer banking lending segment during the first six months of the period.

'€œWe actually aimed for 20 percent year-on-year growth, but we already saw the business rise by 30 to 40 percent annually in the first half,'€ she said on Tuesday.

Citibank has not officially released its first-half performance results. However, Lauren said that consumer business for the past several months had begun to account for 50 percent of the bank'€™s total loans, eventually balancing its lending portfolio between consumer and corporate banking.

Citibank'€™s unaudited financial statement shows that its total outstanding loans reached Rp 41.53 trillion (US$3.11 billion) in April, meaning that consumer'€™s portion accounted for around Rp 20 trillion to Rp 21 trillion.

'€œOur focus remains on serving emerging affluent, affluent and superaffluent customers. These customer types have apparently remained in a '€˜healthy'€™ state despite the current economic slowdown and we believe that they will still possess good purchasing power until year-end,'€ she said.

Lauren said that the credit card business remained the major component, making up two-thirds of the consumer banking business. '€œWe have distributed 1.5 million cards so far and we have around 1 million credit card customers,'€ she said.

She acknowledged that the bank was impacted by a Bank Indonesia (BI) regulation that limited credit card ownership. The regulation stipulates that a customer whose monthly income is less than Rp 10 million is only allowed to have a maximum two credit cards, resulting in a reduction of credit card numbers nationwide.

However, the impact was minimal to Citibank because of its business focus that centers on middle- and upper-class customers, according to Lauren. '€œWe only had to terminate around 5,000 cards because the holders did not meet the BI requirement,'€ she said.

Citibank expects to leverage on its newly launched '€œsmart'€ branches as well to drive growth within the affluent segment. Lauren claimed that the branches enabled its priority customers to get easy access into its banking services using high-tech equipment.

Meanwhile, Citibank country officer Batara Sianturi said that the bank only did minor changes within its revised banking business plan (RBB), submitted to the Financial Services Authority (OJK).

'€œNothing major occurred in the business plan because it will be difficult to revise it every six months, then it will become technical,'€ he said.

He maintained his optimism that Citibank would be able to post better results compared to last year, even though the economy had continued its downward trend.

The lender ended 2014 with overall lending amounting to Rp 37.34 trillion, down 2.2 percent year-on-year. Its net profits, on the other hand, surged 25.3 percent year-on-year to touch Rp 2.5 trillion.