BTN Target Fee-Based Income Increase By 15 Pct

Jakarta, July 5 (Antara) - State-owned saving Bank Tabungan Negara (BTN) has predicted that its fee-based income will increase by 15 percent to Rp677 billion at the end of 2013 from 6 percent in 2012 which totals Rp500 billion. "BTN`s fee-based income is still small. We hope this year the fee-based income will increase to 15 percent from 6 percent in 2012," President Director of BTN Maryono said after a memorandum of understanding with Malaysian National Saving Bank here on Friday. He said that BTN`s fee-based income up to May this year has reached Rp325 billion. So, the target of Rp677 billion could be achieved. "We have almost achieved half of the target. We hope that the target will be achieved at the end of the year," he said. Maryono said that one of the efforts to gain the non-interest income was through cooperation with the Malaysian National Saving Bank in the development of remittance services. He said that the business potential in the remittance service sector was big and open to the banking sector. Based on data available at the National Agency for Placement and Protection of Indonesian Workers Overseas (BNP2TKI), there are at least 6.5 million Indonesian immigrant workers in 142 countries. Of the total, about 2 million are working in Malaysia. The Indonesian immigrant workers overseas, based on the BNP2TKI data, contributed about 6.9 billion US dollars of foreign exchange to the state in 2012. "We are thinking how to provide good services for Indonesian workers in Malaysia and we are also trying to attract all Indonesian workers in Malaysia to become our customers so that they could have transactions with BTN like in Indonesia," said Maryono. He said that BTN previously already had remittance service but it had not yet developed well. So, through the cooperation with the Malaysian National Bank, BTN hoped it would facilitate a good remittance service for Indonesian workers in Malaysia. "The Malaysian National Bank also promises to provide its best product. What I understand from the promise is that it is in term of pricing and services," said Maryono. He said that BTN did not either rule out the possibility of cooperating with other banks in other countries like in Malaysia on remittance services such as the Bank of China and those of Mexico and Germany as long as such cooperation would provide positive and mutual benefit.