Jahja Setiaatmadja, BCA’s president director, recently said the lender planned to acquire two small banks by September, where one bank would be consolidated with BCA, while the second one would be made into a digital bank.

BCA said it had yet to meet with the Financial Services Authority (OJK) to ask for discretion, with regard to the single presence policy, before it could go on with its acquisition plan.

Jahja further hinted at the characteristics of one of the banks that BCA is planning to develop in the future.

“Have you ever heard of KakaoBank in Korea? Starting from opening the account, transactions and other things will be done by using gadgets. There is no face-to-face [process] anymore. That’s how a digital bank should be,” he said.

In total, BCA has prepared Rp 4.5 trillion (US$313.7 million) for the acquisition of the two banks and also for the needs of its eight subsidiaries throughout the end of this year.

The private lender, however, remained tight-lipped over the exact amount allocated specifically for the acquisition.

BCA is confident that it will stay ahead of competitors regarding its digital transformation strategy, since the private lender already has reached critical mass, trust from customers and good products.

“We have partnered with 450,000 merchants and we also have 18 million customers, so we have the ecosystem already,” he said.

Besides its plan to acquire two banks, BCA is also preparing a payment system using QR code technology on its mobile app. The bank says it hopes it can obtain the permit from the regulator by October, so that by that time it could install the QR code system on BCA Mobile and its e-wallet service, Sakuku.

In 2017, BCA established capital venture firm PT Central Capital Ventura (CCV) to increase penetration to fintech firms. Jahja said the lender was currently learning about the possibility of collaborating with more fintech firms to disburse microloans in the future.

Separately, in another event on Friday, BCA announced the development of its call center, called HaloBCA. As part of its digital transformation, HaloBCA plans to incorporate voice and face biometric technology to serve customers.

The voice biometric technology, for instance, allows the company to verify customers by identifying them through their voice and match it with BCA’s database, thus accelerating the verification process.

“We have tested the voice biometric system. We will let the process [develop] itself. If the technology is already mature, it can automatically be applied,” Armand Hartono, BCA deputy president director, told reporters after the HaloBCA book-launching event.

Furthermore, the bank also aims to make customer service more efficient, while reducing costs, by assisting customers using web chat.

According to BCA, customer service via call centers is more economical than face-to-face service. However, web chat is even more economical than call centers.

Recently, transactions have been seeing a shift away from bank branches. In BCA, about 97.5 percent of banking transactions were done through digital channels, while only 2.5 percent of transactions were done in bank branches.

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