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apanese financial giant Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group may become the latest foreign investor to seek deeper entry into Indonesia'€™s lucrative financial market.

The company is currently exploring acquisition opportunities in Asia, including Indonesia, India and the Philippines.

Go Watanabe, Mitsubishi UJF CEO for Asia-Oceania, said that it was interested in acquiring a bank with strong expertise in consumer banking, as reported by Bloomberg.

According to Watanabe, the company wants a majority stake in a '€œrelatively big-sized bank'€ that is strong in both corporate and retail consumer finance.

'€œDoing business with corporates isn'€™t enough. Having a retail business is something we want to capture the high growth of the Asian economy,'€ he said.

Mitsubishi UFJ is seeking double-digit growth in revenue from Asia in the next three years that started April, according to him.

However, Watanabe said that while the acquisition plan was part of the group'€™s three-year strategy, it might only materialize after the period.

In Indonesia, the group'€™s banking services are currently present through the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU), which holds the status of a foreign branch. According to its latest financial report, the Indonesian unit had total assets worth Rp 129.99 trillion (US$9.76 billion) as of March.

Its lending portfolio amounted to Rp 91.83 trillion, while its total third-party funds (DPK) '€” which only consist of demand deposits and time deposits '€” reached Rp 30.76 trillion.

Its operations during the first quarter generated Rp 933.31 billion in profit for the branch. In terms of capital, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ had around Rp 88.6 trillion, as shown by the report.

According to data available on the Mitsubishi UFJ website, Indonesia now sits as the fifth-biggest lending market in Asia for the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, after Hong Kong, Australia, China and Singapore.

Besides lending, Mitsubishi UFJ also runs consumer financing and leasing businesses in Indonesia through PT U Finance Indonesia and PT BTMU-BRI Finance.

At present, U Finance is 65 percent controlled by the BTMU, 20 percent by Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS Co. Ltd., 10 percent by PT Bumiputera-BOT Finance and 5 percent by PT Asuransi Tokio Marine Indonesia.

BTMU-BRI, on the other hand, is 55 percent owned by the BTMU and 45 percent by Indonesian state lender Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI).

Separately, deputy Financial Services Authority (OJK) commissioner for banking supervision Irwan Lubis confirmed that the financial giant had expressed its intention regarding expansion to the banking regulator.

Irwan said that the two had been engaged in discussions during the past one month, but added that the group had not submitted any definite, formal commitment to the OJK.

'€œWe met with the group'€™s executives and they said that it was interested in acquiring stake in an existing bank. It seems that they want to go after a big lender, but nothing specific yet,'€ he said.

Irwan emphasized that the group would be subject to an existing banking regulation on ownership consolidation if it wished to take over majority stake in the target bank.

The regulation requires a majority shareholder to consolidate its subsidiaries, meaning that MUFG'€™s future entity will have to be consolidated, one way or another, with Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ.