W

ibowo, 28, who lives and works in Jakarta, has been using a mobile application that enables him to make cashless financial transactions since May this year.

'€œI usually use the application to top up my phone credit and buy food at certain restaurants that offer discounts when I pay through my virtual account on the application,'€ he said.

The mobile application, which was provided by a state-owned bank, also offered cashless transactions to pay bills and buy clothes in partner merchants, Wibowo said.

He usually spends between Rp 200,000 (US$17.1) and Rp 300,000 a month using the mobile service.

But there are not many like Wibowo in the country '€” literate enough about mobile-commerce and making the most of their smartphones to carry out a number of financial transactions.

Only 1 percent of the population in a number of big cities in Indonesia have used mobile money-transfer services, according to a recent report by Ericsson, dubbed Mobile Commerce in Emerging Asia.

The report'€™s findings show, however, that 57 percent of city dwellers are willing to pay their bills via mobile money in the near future.

The findings were obtained through a survey of 2,000 people in several cities such as Jakarta, Surabaya and Yogyakarta.

They represented some 24 million people living in Indonesia'€™s urban areas, Ericsson stated in the report.

'€œBased on the findings, we see that there is huge potential for mobile money in Indonesia ['€¦] with safety, convenience and speed being the key drivers,'€ said Ericsson ConsumerLab senior advisor Sofia Jorman.

With around 52 percent of the country'€™s population living in cities and with many more rural people flowing into big cities, a quick and efficient method to transfer their money home was necessary, she added.

Indonesia'€™s third-largest telecommunications company XL was optimistic that it could attract more people into using its mobile financial services should the government'€™s financial-inclusion program make progress, said Yessie Yosetya, XL senior general manager for mobile finance and innovation.

XL currently offers three kinds of mobile financial services for its customers, namely XL Tunai, M-Banking and M-Insurance.

'€œWe currently have around 1 million people that transfer their money, pay bills and shop using XL Tunai and around 4 million people using M-Banking to carry out banking transactions,'€ she told The Jakarta Post.

Currently, there were around 160,000 transactions per month using XL Tunai with around Rp 38 million being transferred via M-Banking, she added.

Telkomsel, which is the leading mobile phone operator in the country, aimed to double the number of customers using its mobile money service T-Cash to 30 million people by the end of this year from the current 15 million people, vice president digital payment and mobile banking Andi Utomo said.

'€œWe believe that we can achieve the target as we are developing more features for T-Cash as well as educating the public,'€ he said.