BNI Targets Savings Growth Of Up To 30 Percent After Launching This Application

President Director of BNI Royke Tumilaar. (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - PT Bank Negara Indonesia (Persero) Tbk or BNI targets savings growth of up to 30 percent after launching a new mobile banking application called wondr by BNI.

"I, really, want the savings growth to be possible, not just small this year, maybe we grow 10-20 percent, 20-30 percent. But in the future it should be even better," said BNI President Director Royke Tumilaar to the media in Jakarta, quoted from Antara, Friday, July 5.

Royke said that the DPK is targeted to grow in the average range of 9 percent to 10 percent. Currently, the portion of low-cost funds or current account saving accounts (CASA) has reached more than 70 percent of the total third party funds (DPK). In the future, he hopes, the portion of CASA will grow gradually to 80 percent.

"If CASA is strong, facing an economy like anything, now interest rates are high and we don't always follow the interest rates up, so we can also lend even more aggressively. Now the interest rates are very high, lending is not easy," he said.

Based on the company's monthly financial statements, the number of BNI DPK until the May 2024 period reached Rp788.46 trillion or grew 7.2 percent compared to the same period last year of Rp735.3 trillion. Of the total DPK, CASA consisting of demand deposits and savings was recorded at Rp559.11 trillion in May 2024.

With the presence of 'wondr by BNI', Royke hopes that the platform for individual retail can become a game changer for the company to increase CASA. The number of users and the volume of transactions through mobile banking is also expected to grow significantly.

The 'wondr by BNI' application will later replace BNI Mobile Banking. Royke ensured that all BNI Mobile Banking users would migrate to wondr by BNI. For the time being, BNI Mobile Banking is still running. However, the old version of mobile banking will be closed no later than six months after wondr by BNI is released.

"We will not use two platforms (wondr by BNI as well as BNI Mobile Banking). While the two platforms are still running (at the same time), this one time (BNI Mobile Banking) must close," said Royke.

For information, the number of BNI Mobile users as of the first quarter of 2024 reached 16.9 million. BNI noted that the transaction value in the old mobile banking had reached Rp347 trillion in the first quarter of 2024 or grew 35.9 percent on an annual basis (yoy).

BNI Technology and Operations Director Toto Prasetio said that currently the company is carrying out a major transformation, including the transformation of digital transactions so that it finally launches the latest version of mobile banking.

This year, said Toto, BNI has budgeted capital expenditure (capex) for information technology (IT) of around Rp. 1.9 trillion. According to him, this number increased compared to the previous year in line with the transformation carried out by BNI.

In addition to launching "wondr by BNI" for the retail consumer segment, Toto revealed that BNI will also launch innovations for the wholesale segment. In addition, BNI also continues to strengthen cybersecurity aspects by utilizing the large IT capex.

I had a chance to talk yesterday during an interview with CNBC, about 10 percent to 15 percent of our capex was used for security. For increased security so that we can avoid the occurrence of security incident," said Toto.