President Jokowi: Safeguard and Maintain Digital Finance Development

President Jokowi during the OJK Virtual Innovation Day 2021 (Source: Official YouTube Channel of Presidential Secretariat)

Amid the age of digitalization and COVID-19 pandemic, digital banks and insurances, electronic financing, and financial technology (fintech) continue to grow.

At the same time, digital fraud in financial services and other financial crimes also continue to take place.

Therefore, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo Monday (11/10/2021) affirmed that the rapid development of digital finance must be maintained, supervised, and facilitated so that it can grow well for the people’s economy.

“If we maintain it rapidly and appropriately, Indonesia has a great potential to become a digital giant following China and India and it also can bring us to become the seventh largest world economy in 2030,” said the President at the Opening of OJK (the Financial Service Authority) Virtual Innovation Day 2021.

This momentum, the President added, must be followed by the development of a strong, sustain financial ecosystem.

“A responsible digital financial ecosystem that has risk mitigation for possible legal problems and social problems so that it can prevent losses and improve protection to the community,” President Jokowi said.

On that occasion, the President went on to say that the financing of fintech must also be encouraged for productive activities to provide access for people who are not reachable from banking services, to help MSMEs to carry out cashless transactions, and to help the acceleration of MSMEs’ improvement.

The Head of State also underscored the importance of financial inclusion, adding that financial inclusion must provide broader access to all people, especially lower-middle-class communities.

He also said that financial inclusion must also be a solution to curb the number of social inequality and be able to reach community segments that have not been reached by conventional financial systems, adding that digital finance providers must also be Indonesia-centric oriented, not only Java-centric oriented in order to help the acceleration of the digital finance transformation in all over Indonesia.

“I order the entire financial services industry to carry out financial literacy and digital literacy programs starting from the villages, from the outermost areas so that the people not only can utilize the services of financial industry, but can also facilitate people low risk entrepreneurship,” President Jokowi added.

Furthermore, the President emphasized that a resilient, sustainable digital financial ecosystem must continue to be maintained in order to speed up the inclusive national economic movements and contribute more to the economic recovery.

“The commitment, support, and hard work of all of you are eagerly awaited by economic actors, especially small economic actors, especially actors in MSMEs sector to immediately escape from the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and take new opportunities,” he remarked. (TGH/UN) (AP/EP)