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Top 1000 World BanksSeptember 1 2021

A difficult year for Indonesia’s banks

Indonesia’s biggest banks have slipped down the Top 1000 ranking, but some have bucked the trend and posted strong growth in Tier 1 capital.
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Indonesia’s results in the Top 1000 World Banks ranking show that the banks have felt the effects of a difficult year. The country’s banks have slipped down the ranking as they struggled with declines to their Tier 1 capital.

Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) is the largest of the 10 Indonesian banks that made it into this year’s Top 1000. While the bank has held steady at the top of the country ranking, it dropped to 131st place in the Top 1000 from 112th in 2020, as its Tier 1 capital declined by 5.73% to $13.4bn. However, BRI expanded its asset base by 5.2%.

Bank Mandiri and Bank Central Asia (BCA) switched places in the country ranking, with BCA moving into second place with a 3.9% increase in Tier 1 capital. BCA also saw the biggest rise in total assets of the Indonesian banks that appear in the main ranking – up 15.4%. Despite this, the bank still slides down the overall Top 1000 ranking to 138th, from 129th in 2020.

Indonesian banks enjoyed a vintage year in the 2020 ranking, when they recorded close to 20% increases in their Tier 1 capital during the review period. The Tier 1 capital decline in this year’s rankings may be influenced by the regulator’s requirement for banks to increase their core capital to Rp3tn ($210m) by 2022. Previously, the requirement was to hold Rp100bn. The change also applies to international banks operating in the country.

Bank Pan Indonesia (Panin Bank), the country’s fifth largest bank, has cause for celebration for overtaking BCA in the country’s best-performing rankings. Panin Bank came in first for asset quality, soundness and leverage. Its capital-assets ratio is the highest among the five largest Indonesian banks, which the best-performing methodology was run against. Despite its overall stellar performance, Panin Bank came in fifth place for growth for the second year running.

BCA was relegated to second place in the best-performing rankings overall. It took top place for growth, profitability, return on risk, and liquidity. It grew its deposit base by 17.9% and its profit margin is the highest among the cohort, at 46.9%.

However, profit margins were hit across the board, with Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) seeing a plummet of 3135 basis points (bps), whereas BCA’s fell by just 617bps. On a positive note, BNI took the top spot in the operational efficiency category, improving its cost-to-income ratio by 274bps over the course of the review period.

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Kimberley Long is the Asia editor at The Banker. She joined from Euromoney, where she spent four years as transaction services editor. She has a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Liverpool, and an MA in Print Journalism from the University of Sheffield. Between degrees she spent a year teaching English in Japan as part of the JET Programme.
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