BRIAPI Open Banking Accelerates Business Growth in Indonesia

The future of open banking is expected to be brighter than ever. Open banking has changed the payment landscape, resulting in increasing revenue streams through its revenue-sharing ecosystems, and improving businesses' financial management.

BRIAPI, the open banking platform developed by Bank Rakyat Indonesia, for example, have been reaching out to more than 570 business partners from various industry. It has since improved the volume of transactions and sales generated.

Until the end of 2021, there were 235 million digital transactions through BRIAPI, a towering increase by 156.8% year-on-year, resulting in more than Rp187 trillion (equals to around US$ 12.8 billion) in sales volume. Hence, open banking has answered the need for fast, integrated, easy, and secure transactions for businesses and customers.

Understanding Open Banking

Open banking is a system that allows banks to provide third-party entities access to their customer financial data and information securely through Application Programming Interface (API). Open banking enables businesses to integrate banks’ products and services into their front-end app, thus facilitating their customers to make payments and transactions easily through one app only.

By implementing bank products through API, businesses are enabling their customers to easily transfer funds, compare payment options, top-up e-money, and withdraw cash with cardless methods, thus creating a seamless banking experience. With all these advantages, Bank Indonesia formed a set of blueprints around payment systems, for companies to implement open banking and require them to publish accurate and transparent information.

Open Banking Trends

A collaborative research between PWC and the Open Data Institute states that open banking could disrupt the financial services landscape. In fact, England, which is known as a global leader in banking, has introduced open banking standards since 2016. These standards focus on using data to help people transact, save, borrow, and invest their money.

Bank Indonesia also aimed to achieve those standards through the inauguration of the National Open API Payment Standard (SNAP) on August 16, 2021. SNAP is a national standard set by Bank Indonesia for a set of protocols and instructions regarding the use of APIs in payment transactions.

SNAP BI is a manifestation of the Indonesian Payment System Blueprint (BSPI) 2025 vision which has been inaugurated in 2019 where open banking is one of its five pillars. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, BI had encouraged the use of open banking which is proven vital for sustainable collaboration in industrial development.

BI estimates that by the end of this year the number of digital banking transactions will reach IDR 48 quadrillion, and it will certainly trigger consolidation in the payment system industry. Open banking plays a vital role in further increasing the number. As a result, the level of digital adoption will be more strengthened. In the first half of 2021 alone, there were 21 million new digital consumers with 72 percent of them coming from non-urban areas.

BI Governor Perry Warjiyo also emphasized that open banking is a crucial part of digital transformation in the banking sector. Moreover, after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, people have been shifting to digital transactions. Perry continued, that if businesses cannot follow the development of open banking, it is likely that they will be left behind.

Digital Business Growth in Indonesia

The establishment of open banking standards and the continuous growth of e-money transactions have also contributed to the growth of startups in Indonesia. According to the Startup Ranking report as of May 2022, Indonesia ranks fifth in the country with the highest number of startups in the world, with a total of 2,375 startups. Indonesia is only left by the United States, India, Britain, and Canada—making us number one in Southeast Asia.

Apart from startups, Indonesian MSMEs are also starting to develop into digital businesses. According to research by Google, Temasek & Bain Company in 2021, the majority of MSMEs players have already done MSMEs digitalization. In fact, as many as 98% of digital merchants have provided digital payment methods. Moving forward, they will optimize digital payments that are safe and practical.

As a digital business accelerator, BRI supports these businesses through BRIAPI open banking. BRIAPI has over 570 partners across Indonesia, from digital to non-digital companies. Various BRIAPI services such as BRIVA (Virtual Account), Transfer to BRI Account, BRIZZI card top-up, as well as informational APIs that can help manage businesses' finances are proven helpful in creating a digital ecosystem for BRI partners.

Big names of digital companies that have integrated BRIAPI include Shopee, Tokopedia, Gopay, OVO, LinkAja, Traveloka, DOKU and Investree. BRIAPI is also the first Open API platform in Indonesia that has acquired ISO: 27001 and PADSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) certifications to ensure customer data security.

As a standardized open API, BRIAPI strives to realize the Indonesia Payment System Blueprint 2025 vision, particularly in giving a transparent, safe, and reliable system for data and financial information. This digital initiative demonstrates BRI's efforts to boost financial inclusion throughout Indonesia.

BRIAPI’s Contribution to Business Growth

Here are 3 real case studies on how BRIAPI contributes to the growth of BRI’s partners.

DOKU

DOKU is a pioneer technology-based payment company in Indonesia. Since its establishment in 2007, DOKU has only had one problem to solve: the conventional payment system in Indonesia. So, they attempt to provide a digital payment ecosystem through a payment gateway.

DOKU has been integrated with BRIAPI since 2020 with BRIVA as its first product. Now, the BRIVA service holds the largest usage for DOKU since it provides the best payment options for DOKU merchants, especially those who are BRI customers.

In addition, DOKU also utilizes the informational API from BRIAPI: Account Statement and Account Information. Those two help DOKU automate the reconciliation process. As a result, they have successfully managed to cut down various manual processes in payment reconciliation, thereby speeding up the company's workflow.

“Our vision must be the same, which is to help Indonesia towards a cashless society. It's a strong vision and very hard to do, but not impossible. We believe we can get there, and one of the many ways is by continuing to collaborate with BRIAPI,” said DOKU Chief Innovation Officer Rudianto Thong.

Fiberconnect

PT. Bina Informatika Solusindo (Fiberconnect) is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) company. Fiberconnect targets areas that have limited internet access, such as Madiun, Bengkulu, and Cirebon. As a result, customers have internet access since Fiberconnect has been facilitating them.

Before integrating with BRIVA, customers must come to the Fiberconnect office to pay their internet bills. Of course, this method is highly impractical compared to digital payment methods. As a solution, Fiberconnect began to integrate with BRIAPI in February 2022. With BRI Virtual Account (BRIVA), Account Statement, and Account Information services, Fiberconnect succeeded in digitalizing its payment system.

Today, about 70% of Fiberconnect customers use BRIVA as a payment method. The number indicates the success of the Fiberconnect-BRIAPI integration. In addition, two informational APIs have succeeded in shortening the process of confirming, verifying, and reconciling payments from 30 minutes to just 1 minute.

“We are happy with the BRIAPI digital service. We are sure that BRI will always accompany Fiberconnect in the future for the company's expansion efforts. We believe that digitalizing payments through BRIAPI can help potential customers to use our services," said Fiberconnect General Manager Alif Banura regarding BRIAPI's role in Fiberconnect.

Dunex

PT. Dunia Express Transindo (Dunex) is a total logistics company that provides various logistics services. As a logistics service provider, Dunex relies heavily on its human resources. One of them is their logistics driver.

Dunex needs to provide travel fees for more than 1000 logistics drivers. But, they still use manual transfers and cash payments to distribute the fees—not in line with the company's digital transformation vision.

To solve the problem, Dunex integrated two BRIAPI services, Transfer to BRI Account and Account Statement. Both play a pivotal role in distributing payments to drivers. As a result, Dunex was able to cut transaction times from 30 minutes to 10 minutes. They no longer need to manually input transaction data thanks to the automated system from BRIAPI.

"We hope that after this implementation is stable and running smoothly, we can implement BRIAPI for other types of transactions," said Dunex Senior Finance Manager Johan Wie regarding BRIAPI's performance in his company.

Fiberconnect, Dunex, and DOKU are three of more than 570 BRI partners who have used BRIAPI. The three of them succeeded in maximizing BRIAPI's potential in optimizing their business. You can also start your own success story with BRIAPI by starting the integration now.

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