Neo Commerce Bank Is Still a Bank, 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 start of its launch in March 2021, the Neobank banking app racked up one million downloads. Now its users have shot up to 17.4 million users.

Refreshing memory, Bank Neo Commerce is the result of the rebranding of PT Bank Yudha Bhakti Tbk after being annexed by PT Akulaku Silvrr Indonesia which now holds the majority of its shares of 24.98%.

In detail, DailySocial.id summarizes some interesting notes from President Director Tjandra Gunawan while filling the Fortune Indonesia Summit 2022 session with the topic “How to Become a Game Changer”.

BNC Achievements

In addition to the user base, Tjandra also mentioned another achievement from the growth of financial products. In collaboration with Akulaku as of December 2021, BNC also noted that it had distributed digital loans of Rp. 2.2 trillion, with an outstanding of Rp. 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. The company sees that 40%-50% of Indonesian people are still categorized as unbanked and underserved.

“They are a group of people who do not have access to finance, and have bank accounts, but they are only used for saving. After we studied [the market], it is not the fault of the consumers [if they do not have a bank account], but the banking mechanism that unknowingly excludes 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 become a game changer, Tjandra believes that he must come up with a different concept from most digital banks in Indonesia. In a previous interview with DailySocial.id, he also revealed the same thing where his services must be relevant to people’s daily lives.

He highlighted two things. First, generally people access banking applications only when they want to make transactions 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 ups. That way, our features are not just financial. We are still a bank but we offer new ways,” he said.

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 their physical presence because the function of branch offices becomes less useful. As a result, there are savings in operating costs.

“Because we transformed from physical to digital, [operational] costs went down. At that time we had two choices; do we just pocket this [cost savings] so we can be profitable, or [cost] is returned to the customer? We take the second option.” He said.