Jakarta. An initiative by the central bank encouraging poor Indonesians to open bank accounts has attracted little interest from the tens of millions of low-income citizens who don’t have accounts already. Hoping to bring more people into the baking system, Bank Indonesia has been pushing about 70 commercial lenders to promote a product called Tabunganku, or My Savings, which requires only a small initial deposit and charges no administrative fees.
But Adang Saputra, a senior researcher at the central bank’s financial stability bureau, said on Wednesday that Tabunganku had attracted only 420,000 customers since its February introduction.
BI had been expecting at least one million accounts to be opened this year. A 2009 survey by the bank found that some 43 million Indonesians did not use banks.
