BNI Continues To Speed Up Global Business Expansion

Illustration (doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - PT Bank Negara Indonesia Tbk (BNI) continues to maximize its business expansion in foreign markets. One of them is through customer expansion and optimization of global banking service performance in early 2022, in line with the strengthening global economic recovery.

Director of Treasury and International BNI, Henry Panjaitan, said that the performance of foreign trade at the beginning of this year was still growing positively. This can be seen from the increasing demand for Indonesian commodities and products as well as imports from abroad, thus boosting BNI's global banking performance.

"We hope that the positive performance score last year can continue this year. Moreover, the trend of foreign trade at the beginning of this year is still very positive," said Henry, in his official statement, as reported by Antara, Monday, March 7.

BNI's export trade volume in 2021 grew by 76.73 percent. Meanwhile, import trade volume also grew significantly, up to 120.41 percent. This achievement was higher than the growth in national trade volume which reached 41.88 percent for exports and 38.59 percent for imports.

According to Henry, this positive trend will also encourage an increase in fee-based income (FBI) for trade in 2021, which will grow 7.46 percent.

Therefore, this year's customer expansion efforts are carried out by cooperating with many digital platforms that bring together creative MSME players in Indonesia and buyers from abroad, so it is hoped that more MSME players will have the opportunity to export their products abroad.

"Of course, we already have many strategic cooperation plans that we will run throughout this year. Not only to improve transaction performance, but we are also looking for opportunities for financing including the Indonesian diaspora abroad," said Henry,

Henry also emphasized that his party sees that the economic impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is relatively minimal on the domestic economy, because in 2021 exports to Russia will be recorded at 1.49 billion US dollars or only 0.65 percent of Indonesia's total exports.

Meanwhile, Indonesia's exports to Ukraine were also recorded at only US$416.9 million or 0.18 percent of total domestic exports.

Nevertheless, BNI continues to pay attention to the impact of the conflict on the increase in world oil prices, which will eventually have an impact on rising inflation in Indonesia and potentially accelerate the increase in Bank Indonesia's benchmark interest rate.

He also hopes that the increase in commodity prices can encourage stronger domestic economic growth and it is hoped that the conflict will end soon, in order to provide certainty in doing business and make the investment climate better, so that it has a positive impact on the economy.

"This will certainly have a good impact on many economic sectors in Indonesia, which are currently quite well through the economic recovery period," said Henry.