I had the privilege of joining our strategic partner PT Abhimata Persada (PTAP), representatives from Indonesia’s top banks and financial tech companies and my IR colleagues at PTAP’s event – Now It’s the Time for Real Time. We gathered to discuss the BI-FAST implementation in Indonesia.
The event was timed well, with most attendees already live on the scheme, and starting to consider what comes next. IR contributed a global perspective on the adoption of real-time payments, which was welcomed by the audience as they are in adoption mode.
Transition from legacy systems
As legacy payment systems continue to hinder market innovation, Southeast Asian countries are moving away from increasingly outdated technology. They’re now leveraging strong domestic central infrastructure as the foundation for real-time digital payments.
Indonesia is one of the latest Southeast Asian countries to upgrade its national payments infrastructure to drive digital economies and accelerate growth.
BI-Fast is positioned well to benefit from the lessons learned from previous schemes and address the goal of greater financial inclusion.
What is BI-Fast?
BI-Fast was introduced and is provided by Bank Indonesia (Indonesia’s central bank) as a payment system infrastructure that is accessible through applications offered by the payment system industry to facilitate retail payments for consumers. The services will gradually be expanded to include bulk credit, direct debit, and requests for payment.
Bank Indonesia has indicated that it is expected all payment service providers in the region will benefit from this infrastructure as it’ll become the backbone of retail payment system infrastructure moving forward. When complete, the transformation will incorporate 135 banks, as well as merchants and payment service providers, making it one of the world’s largest real-time payments initiatives to date.
What are the impacts of BI-Fast?
As with much of Southeast Asia, digital payments have gained considerable traction in the country. It is reported that they are in regular use by more than half (55%) of the country’s consumers.
BI-Fast is accelerating payments in Indonesia, using secure and convenient instruments and channels in real-time, while operating 24/7. Through BI-Fast, corporate banking customers can make transfers of up to 250 million Indonesian Rupiah (IDR) in real-time and will only be charged 2,500IDR per transaction.
According to Bank Indonesia, the BI-FAST implementation “aims to create a fast, convenient, affordable, secure, reliable payment system services to accelerate the economic recovery and revive growth in the region, including through economic and financial inclusion.”
How can IR Transact help?
IR Transact’s Real-Time Payments solution provides a single dashboard to simplify the complexity of managing real-time payments. You can track every detail of your workflows, monitor and manage real-time payments to ensure overall payment health, and deliver results that drive optimal business outcomes.
Our solution can help in isolating real-time bottlenecks and hung transactions for banks to ensure optimal user and customer experience. It can help you build a robust analysis to track multi-leg transactions in the payment hubs as part of your modernization journey.
Now is the time to ensure that you are across your real-time payments processes and understand what’s expected, so that you can stay ahead of your real-time competition.
Monitor Bi-Fast transaction flows through Connector
