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early a month after state-owned lender Bank Mandiri announced its collaboration with Lombard Odier, a Swiss private bank specializing in asset and wealth management, Bank Mandiri claimed to have received a warm welcome from customers.

The collaboration between two parties was meant to develop Bank Mandiri’s private banking business by enabling high net worth individuals to invest offshore.

PT Mandiri Manajemen Investasi (MMI), an investment management company that is a subsidiary of Bank Mandiri, will offer investment products for customers, with the underlying being the offshore investment products managed by Lombard Odier.

“The products will be offered through a discretionary portfolio mandate program or PDNI according to the Financial Services Authority [OJK],” MMI director Endang Astharanti said on Tuesday in Jakarta.

Bank Mandiri hopes that through the collaboration, Indonesian customers now do not need to buy offshore products abroad, as they can easily get access through Bank Mandiri.

MMI offers three types of products that will be adjusted based on each customer’s risk profiles, typically for long-term investment horizons. These three choices were capital preservation, capital accumulation and capital growth.

“We are introducing a risk-based approach for customers, based on the investment philosophy from Lombard Odier. So, instead of giving specific targeted return, Lombard Odier provides predetermined target risks,” she said.

Generally, Indonesian customers have their investment portfolio in the domestic market, which are mostly rupiah denominated. The partnership with Lombard Odier would enable customers to diversify their investment, since the investment will be in global market, which would be in the form of the United States dollar.

The lender’s main target would be business owners that have long preferred to park their wealth outside Indonesia, such as in Singapore. All this time, investors have opted to invest in Singapore since the banks there provide a wide range of products and services for investing in global markets.

“So far, we have been prospecting approximately 50 clients through a one-on-one approach,” said Elina Wirjakusuma, senior vice president of wealth management group of Bank Mandiri, explaining the progress of Bank Mandiri’s collaboration with Lombard Odier.

“This isn’t like we are selling usual mutual funds, because it involves a bilateral contract between investment managers and customers directly, so it won’t be a collective contract like the regular mutual funds,” she added.

Responding to the collaboration, Patrick Odier, senior managing partner of Lombard Odier Group, said: “We always see partnerships such as the one with Mandiri Bank as an opportunity to bring our know-how, 222 years of international experience, to more domestic-oriented entrepreneurs and families.”

Helped by the new cooperation with Lombard Odier, Bank Mandiri targets that its asset under management (AUM) can grow by double digits toward the year-end.

Bank Mandiri wealth management business has shown improvement over the past few years. With a total of more than 51,000 high net worth clients, its AUM investment portfolio rose by 26 percent to Rp 48 trillion (US$3.4 billion) at the end of 2017.

The number of high net worth individuals has been growing by 16 percent annually. The total value of Bank Mandiri’s wealth management’s managed fund, which is a combination of investment portfolio and banking products, reached Rp 192 trillion as of 2017.

With the recent Indonesian tax amnesty program, as well as exchange of information among tax authorities worldwide, the demand for global investment access has surged, thus the partnership was intended to help to meet this demand.