(MENAFN- Gulf Times) A remarkable pilot project of Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), or People's Bank of Indonesia, a partly state owned bank and the country's major financial institutions focusing on small-scale and microfinance lending, is trying to solve the problem to provide banking services to people living on an archipelago that comprises some 17,500 islands and has a 240-million population of which an estimated 66% are still "unbanked." Despite BRI operates around 10,000 branches in Indonesia, it still does not reach a large part of the population, but opening more brick-and-mortar outlets would be simply uneconomical for the bank.
Thus, last year and in a first step, BRI launched the first of its so-called "Floating Banks," a specially equipped vessel that carries a fully-fledged, air-conditioned banking branch together with automatic teller machines, to reach out to remote islands where there are no banks at all.
In the project, the ship "Bahtera Seva I" from Monday to Friday cruises across the Kepulauan Seribu territory ("Thousand Islands") off the coast of Jakarta, a string of partly inhabited islands stretching north into the Java Sea. The ship is currently rotating between the six main islands, whose economy is based on fishing, tourism and aquaculture, and offers the same banking services as in mainland BRI branches such as money deposits, loan products and bill payments, and an ATM machine dispenses cash and handles account transactions. The boat is manned by eleven staff, comprising crew, four bank officers and an armed guard.
According to a BRI spokesman, the services have been very well received by many of the roughly 8,000 islanders who previously had no access to any banking services and couldn't do any banking transactions, but instead were used to hide their cash in jars or elsewhere and needed to borrow working capital for their small businesses from unofficial money lenders who charge 30% and more interest € per month.
According to Bambang Dwi Nugroho, BRI's head of microbusiness development, the floating bank project will now be expanded to eastern Indonesia, namely to Kalimantan, Sulawesi and the remote Moluccas province. Investment for one banking boat is around $1.11mn, but the project is paying off, he said, not just because of its commercial potential but also because it serves a social purpose, providing people with more business opportunities, raising their financial literacy and helping them become independent from ruinous lending from illegal loan sharks.
The banking ships, however, remain a smart solution just for coastal areas and islands. To reach the population living on larger remote islands, banking staff still relies either on small river boats with cash machines to make their way inlands or on four-wheel-drive cars to reach villages on gravel roads. In densely forested areas, banking employees have no other choice than heading inland on foot, carrying bags full of cash and handheld bank card readers so that villagers can make deposits or transactions.
But BRi is also developing a solution for this: Later in 2016, the bank plans to launch its own satellite, BRISat, from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, which will allow expanding its services to literally all corners of the vast Indonesian archipelago by supporting initiatives such as the floating banks and self-service banking stations in villages by reliable satellite connections. BRISat will cost about $250mn and will make BRI the first bank in the world to have its own satellite.
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