Tempuh Jalan Berliku Dalam Kembangkan Bank Syariah, Bos BSI: Kita Need An Example Of Malaysia

JAKARTA - Director of Bank Syariah Indonesia (BSI) Tbk Hery Gunardi said it was necessary to take a winding road in developing Islamic banks in Indonesia before finally being able to advance rapidly like now.

"We started the merger of Islamic banking not from zero but minus. We all know Islamic banking from 1991 and until 2021 it is 30 years of ups and downs," he said at a Hearing Meeting (RDP) with Commission XI DPR RI, quoted by Antara, Wednesday, September 28.

Hery stated that one of the indicators of Islamic banking in Indonesia that cannot grow properly and largely is because before BSI there was none of the Islamic banks that managed to enter the top 10 ranks.

The majority of Islamic banks in Indonesia were previously only able to rank 20th, 30th, even 40th, so when Hery took on the task of developing BSI, the scale became one of its priorities.

"Because if there is no scale, what are you going to do, it's difficult. Want to make an e-commerce sharia, where does the payment system come from? It's hard," he said.

The literacy rate at that time was low even though the Muslim population in Indonesia reached around 220 million people, but the understanding of Islamic banking was very low compared to conventional banking.

Then, the Islamic bank was first small in size and the service services were known to be slow so that it was unable to compete with conventional banks and even only located in small shophouses.

In addition, the digital technology is also lagging behind because no one has ever invested in this development area considering that in the past Islamic banks were only part of conventional banks.

"The name is also part or child, the name of the child is the father who ate first, his son later. That's for example right. Taking care of the base first before the terminal," said Hery.

The low quality of human resources (HR) was also a factor that caused Islamic banks in Indonesia not to develop in the past.

Therefore, the merger of Islamic banks through BSI tries to improve all these shortcomings, improve the quality of human resources, increase the size of banks to transform and attract large markets.

According to Hery, Indonesia needs to follow Malaysia's example of providing various conveniences and incentives in order to encourage the development of its Islamic bank.

In Malaysia, 23 years ago they started sharia, the government gave different flying fields, so they were given tax incentives. For sharia bank customers, the tax deposit is 0 percent. This makes flying files different to pursue conventional ones, he explained.

He said that BSI is currently waiting for various Regional Development Banks (BPD) to convert to Islamic banks such as Bank Aceh, Riau Islands Bank, NTB Bank and Bank Nagari.

"So if there is a bank that converts to sharia, the automatic market share will increase," said Hery.