Managing Director of Neo Commerce Bank: We Are Still Banks, But Offering New Ways

It has been almost two years since PT Bank Neo Commerce Tbk (IDX: BBYB) has enlivened the Indonesian digital banking industry. In this short trip, Bank Neo Commerce (BNC) said it had recorded a significant achievement.

One of them is user growth. At the beginning of its launch in March 2021, the application banking neobank earned one million downloads. Now its users have shot up to 17,4 million users.

Refreshing memory, Neo Commerce Bank is the result rebranding from PT Bank Yudha Bhakti Tbk after being annexed by PT Akulaku Silvrr Indonesia which now holds the majority of its shares by 24,98%.

more, DailySocial.id summarizes some interesting notes from President Director Tjandra Gunawan when filling the Fortune Indonesia Summit 2022 session with the topic "How to Become a Game Changer".

BNC Achievements

Apart from the user base, Tjandra also mentions another achievement from the growth of financial products. In collaboration with Akulaku as of December 2021, BNC also noted that it had disbursed digital loans of IDR 2,2 trillion, with outstanding IDR 1,2 trillion.

Then, third party funds managed by BNC have reached more than Rp. 10 trillion, while BNC's assets have bounced to Rp. 14,5 trillion from Rp. 4 trillion in 2020.

According to Tjandra, this achievement does not necessarily make BNC's position bigger. Moreover, as many as 70% of Neobank's users are still concentrated in Java and its surroundings. According to him, this is still a big homework to reach financial inclusion throughout Indonesia.

"We see that 40%-50% of Indonesians are still in the category unbanked and underserved. They are a group of people who do not have access to finance, and have a bank account, but only use it for saving. After we studied [the market], it's not the consumer's fault [if they don't have a bank account], but the banking mechanism that unconsciouslyexclude them," he explained.

In addition, he said, first sliding into the market will not automatically make digital bank players win the market. He emphasized the use of momentum as an important aspect of providing services to the community. In this context, the Covid-19 pandemic provided a big impetus for BNC to digitize banking services, but with a different concept.

Gamification on banking

To be game changer, Tjandra believes that they must come up with a different concept from most digital banks in Indonesia. In previous interview with DailySocial.id, he also revealed the same thing where the service must be relevant to people's daily lives.

He highlighted two things. First, generally people access the application banking only when you want to transact or check incoming money, there is no more activity outside of that. To embed the application with the daily life of users, Neobank embeds a gamification feature. Second, they have a chat feature to facilitate interaction between users.

"Through this gamification, users can generate coins and can be exchanged for additional interest rates, cash, cashback top up. That way, our features are not just financial. We are still a bank but we are offering a new way."

With this gamification concept, Neobank managed to pocket as many as 20 million application downloads, with 17,4 million of them being active users.

Advantages of digital banking

BNC is claimed to be a bank that dares to offer the highest deposit interest rates in Indonesia with a range of 8% per year. What is BNC's reasoning behind this bold move?

According to Tjandra, becoming a digital bank allows companies to save and improve cost efficiency on certain components. Since Neobank launched during the Covid-19 pandemic, companies can reduce physical facilities (physical presence) because the function of the branch office becomes less useful. As a result, there are savings in operating costs.

"Because we are transforming from physical to digital, [operational] costs have dropped. At that time we had two choices; do we just pocket this [cost savings] so we can profitable, or this [cost] is returned to customer? We take the second option."