Once As Commissioner Of Bank Mandiri, Wimboh: I Know What The Islamic Financial Industry Is Like

JAKARTA - Chairman of the Board of Commissioners of the Financial Services Authority (OJK) Wimboh Santoso said the Islamic financial industry, particularly banking, must focus on working on special segments so that it can grow and contribute more to the economy.

"The Islamic finance industry has the potential to develop by working on the retail sector and MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises)," he said in a webinar Tuesday, January 19.

Wimboh added, Islamic finance in Indonesia has characteristics that are quite close to grassroots levels of society. For this reason, great attention must be paid to this segmentation so that the performance of Islamic financial services institutions can be properly accelerated.

"Because the Islamic financial industry, especially Islamic banking, which is experiencing credit (financing) problems is working on commercial segmentation," he said.

He put forward this conclusion because Wimboh had once held a strategic position in a state bank with large assets.

"I know because I was once the Commissioner (President Commissioner) of Bank Mandiri," he said.

Meanwhile, another strategic step in encouraging the sharia financial industry to run faster is to synergize various government and private sector policies to create a supportive ecosystem.

"Next, we create the halal ecosystem. For example, we will make halal tourism, the hotels are halal, the financing institutions are also halal. Things like this allow the contribution of sharia to be bigger, "he explained.

To note, the Islamic financial industry shows positive performance in 2020 even though it is in a pandemic situation.

Over the past year, bank credit growth is known to have contracted to minus 2.41 percent. This figure is very different from the performance of Islamic banking financing which is still growing by 9.5 percent.

Meanwhile, the four state-owned banks that are members of the State Bank Association (Himbara) were only able to slightly increase by 0.6 percent.