Anticipating Terrorist Funding, OJK Asks Fintech Mandatory Reporting As Of April 1

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JAKARTA - The Financial Services Authority (OJK) will require the financial technology (fintech) industry based on peer to peer lending (P2P lending) lending and borrowing services to report every transaction data. The policy will come into effect as of April 1, 2021.

This step is taken to anticipate acts of money laundering and terrorism financing or APU PPT (Anti Money Laundering and Prevention of Terrorism Financing).

"This year as well as April 1, 2021, there is an obligation to report or implement APU PPT in the fintech or P2P lending industry, that's a challenge too, how can this industry not be used as a media for money laundering, a media for terrorist financing," said Deputy Director of Regulations, Research, and Fintech Development OJK, Munawar, Wednesday, February 17th.

In addition to the challenge of ensuring a safe fintech environment for users, OJK also sees COVID-19 as still a challenge. This is because, according to Munawar, COVID-19 has a very strong influence on distribution in P2P lending.

Lending in P2P lending experienced a decline at the start of the pandemic, to be precise April and May 2020, but it started to recover again in August.

"This means that we are optimistic in the future, in January, February and so on, along with the improving national economy, the P2P lending industry will also have higher lending," said Munawar.

"Of course, then it is not 100 percent the same as previous years in terms of the growth sequence, but we are optimistic that this distribution will continue to increase or continue to grow," he continued.

Not only about industrial growth, according to Munawar, improving quality is also a challenge going forward, one of which is credit scoring.

"The data in us, the loans that have been collected, the success rate of repayment is still 95.22 percent. There are still 4 percent of this that is still stuck. The next step is to reduce the level of congestion," he said.

Apart from the challenges faced, the fintech industry is experiencing growth amid the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even though the growth was not as high as in previous years, in terms of lending in 2020, the fintech industry managed to distribute IDR 74.41 trillion, meaning that it increased 26.47 percent year-on-year.

"In terms of growth, it is decreasing, but of course it is high growth compared to national economic growth or other industrial growth," said Munawar.

Meanwhile, in terms of the number of users, to date, Munawar said, there are 45 million user accounts and 717 thousand accounts of people who provide loans or lenders.

"So, there are indeed very many, and we are optimistic that in the future there will also be more. This Fintech is here to provide funding and of course to build the national economy," Munawar added.