This extreme transformation is rooted in the broadening of an agriculture-focused strategy to include the unbanked and the self-employed ‘gig workers’.

A subsidiary of Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), BRI Agro which is largely focused on serving the agricultural sector for three decades, is applying for approval to transform into a digital-only bank.

With this impending transition, the groundwork has also been laid—in the Cloud. The bank will be migrating its core banking and internal banking applications to the public cloud to take advantage of lower latency, improved scale, and advanced security while meeting local compliance requirements and optimizing infrastructure spend.

As consumers in the country begin to expect the same level of service from their banks that they already experience from other internet sectors such as e-commerce, BRI Agro’s transformation allows it to manage the end-to-end customer lifecycle online from Day One and also deliver personalized customer experiences to Indonesia’s unbanked. 

  • Embracing a microservices architecture and Open Banking APIs
    This confers agility to innovate at speed and roll out new offerings quickly via Kubernetes and Apigee Open Banking APIs to connect and build entirely new consumer-facing services. 
  • Fueling growth without compromising security and compliance
    The bank’s cloud infrastructure will have embedded security to safeguard banking data and assists it with regulatory compliance, fraud prevention, and overall security.

The bank’s CEO Kaspar Situmorang hopes the transformation to a full digital bank can scale the organization “to serve the needs of the millions of people in the Gig Economy throughout Indonesia.”

Megawaty Khie, Country Director, Google Cloud (Indonesia) said: “Innovation in financial services and the ability to adapt in a post pandemic world is set by technology disruption. We’re proud to provide the robust and secure Cloud platform that enables people across Indonesia’s Gig Economy to access finance faster with BRI Agro, and to support BRI in its mission to improve financial inclusion and resilience.”