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ndonesia’s most profitable bank, Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), will involve more individual agents in rural areas across the country to further expand the bank’s branchless banking service.

BRI vice president director Sunarso said in Jakarta on Wednesday that the bank expected to increase the number of its individual agents hired for the branchless banking service called BRILink by about 60 percent to 135,000 people this year from 84,550 people as of December 2016.

With the recruitment of more agents, the value of the transactions carried out through BRILink would increase by more than 50 percent to Rp 208.5 trillion (US$15.61 million) from 2016, Sunarso said following the launch of BRILink Mobile, a mobile banking application specially designed to boost services provided by the bank, at a market in Serpong, South Tangerang, on Wednesday.

The mobile banking application replaces the Electronic Data Capture (EDC) device previously used by the agents in conducting various transactions, such as fund withdrawals, fund transfers and online payments.

BRI customers who run a small business, such as grocery vendors, and have a deposit of at least Rp 3 million in the bank can apply to become a sales agent for the BRILink service, a position that would involve helping others — especially those living in remote areas — to carry out bank transactions.

Sunarso said the majority of BRILink transactions took place in Java. However, the highest transaction value per agent was in Sumatra, indicating that people outside of Java had plenty of money but no access to the bank or simply did not have enough time to visit the bank.

“BRI has 10,643 branches and 24,292 ATM machines to serve customers in urban areas,” he said, adding that with BRILink, the bank can provide services to its customers in 81,253 villages.

With total assets of about Rp 1 quadrillion as of December 2016, state-owned BRI was the bank with the largest number of services for micro, small and medium enterprises (UMKM).

Bank Indonesia (BI) executive director Eni V. Panggabean said BRILink was part of the government’s program called National Strategy for Financial Inclusion (SNKI), which aimed at increasing financial inclusion.

“President [Joko] Jokowi [Widodo] targets to achieve a financial inclusion goal of 75 percent in 2019 from 67.8 percent in 2016, which means in 2019, 75 percent of Indonesian adults will have bank accounts,” Eni said.

She added that BRILink was among the major branchless banking services in Indonesia both in terms of the value of the transactions and the number of agents.

Meanwhile, Risun, a 40-year-old man and grocery vendor in Gambir, Central Jakarta, has worked as an agent of BRILink since December 2014 and carried out at least 50 transactions a day. He received on average a commission of Rp 100,000 each day.

Elsewhere, Hening Sumiyati, a 47-year-old woman, joined BRILink in September 2015. She conducted about 100 transactions per day with an average commission of Rp 300,000. “My earnings rose sharply from before joining BRILink,” she said. (dra)