Tirta Segara, the director of multilateral cooperation of Bank Indonesia`s International Department, said after speaking at the 10th International Trade Forum here on Tuesday that "we have already started and continued preparing our banks, human resources, capital, management and networks (for the unification)."
He admitted that efforts to improve human resources still had to be continued in order to be able to compete in the ASEAN region.
"The number of certified human resources actually has already been quite big but the fact is in the ASEAN region, Singapore for example, the human resources have advanced beyond the Indonesian standards and therefore improvement still has to be continued," he said.
With regard to capital, Tirta said BI would implement the Basel III (Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) system as of 2013, especially with regard to minimum capital requirement to more reflect performance and anticipate various risks banks could face.
"Seen from banks` performance ratio they have on average been good. It is only about their nominal size. Many banks are still small," he said.
Tirta explained if the ratio of their nominal size such as capital, foreign exchange income from exports and interest rates is small it is feared the domestic banks could not compete against banks with wider networks.
"Wide networks will affect funding, such as making it cheaper and others," he said.
In view of that he said Bank Indonesia would consolidate the banks with regard to finding strategic partners to make them bigger in terms of their capital and networks.
He said the unification of the ASEAN banking sector did not mean Indonesia must be ready to venture abroad but must also prepare themselves to meet foreign banks that enter into the country.
"Our Gross Domestic Product is also still low, below 30 percent and so the market is still big. Therefore we will prepare by exploiting the domestic market so that when foreign parties enter we will be ready," he said. (A060/YH/BSR/A014)
Editor: Kunto Wibisono
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