TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
BRI grabs 15% share in remittance market
Change Size
Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) president director Suprajarto (left) and former youth and sport affairs minister Adhyaksa Dault (second right) review the preparation of BRI's assistance to its customers during Idul Fitri exodus season on June 21 in Jakarta. (JP/Ramadani Saputra)
S
uminten, a 42-year-old woman who has been working as a caregiver for about seven years in Taiwan, transfers part of her salary to her family in Ponorogo, East Java, twice a month through her account at state-owned lender Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI).
“As a customer of BRI, I can now travel from Taiwan to my hometown under the arrangement of the bank,” she told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.
Suminten’s transfer of money is one of the many remittances made by Indonesians working as domestic helpers in other countries.
BRI corporate secretary Hari Siaga said money transfers involving migrant workers contributed a big portion to the remittance business of his bank, which controls a 15 percent share of the remittance market.
Most migrants sending money to their families in Indonesia through BRI accounts work in the informal sector in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.
Hari said that during the January-April period, BRI recorded 5.16 million remittance transactions with a total value of Rp 783 trillion (US$58.86 billion), giving the bank about Rp 100 billion in fee-based income. In the first quarter of 2017, the bank earned fee-based revenue worth Rp 2.5 trillion, 25 percent higher than the Rp 2 trillion in the same period of last year.
BRI president director Suprajarto said his bank was likely to achieve its double-digit growth target in its fee-based revenue in 2017.“Our performance is on the right track to achieve the target. The biggest contribution still comes from deposit administration fees,” he said. (rdi/ags)
