Indonesia Embraces Full-Fledged Sharia Financial Ecosystem, Says VP

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com – Indonesia’s Vice President Ma’ruf Amin has expressed satisfaction with the development of the sharia-compliant ecosystem in the country’s economic and financial sectors.

“In the field of Islamic finance, Indonesia has achieved a relatively complete ecosystem,” said Ma’ruf in a webinar organized by Infobank magazine on Tuesday, October 27.

Ma'ruf said the sharia economic and financial ecosystem has been formed by laws and regulations, regulators, the business community, and the people.

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It already has a strong position, making the development of Islamic finance faster, he said.

However, there is still room for improvement in the sharia economic ecosystem, he added.

“This includes the role of the big Islamic financial institutions to serve as an anchor for other Islamic financial institutions. The big Islamic financial institutions have not reached the maximum efforts.

“Similarly, there few Islamic microfinance institutions that serve the society in the grassroots levels,” he said.

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Therefore, the government came up with several policies to catalyze the development of the Islamic economy and finance by merging three state-owned sharia banks, namely Bank Syariah Mandiri, BNI Syariah, and BRI Syariah into the biggest sharia bank.

The merger of sharia banks

The vice president called on the people to not be worried about the merger of the three state-owned sharia banks as this will not affect micro, small and medium enterprises in accessing capital.

“With these various policies, people should not be worried as the policies will not block small and medium enterprises’ access to capital,” he told the webinar participants.

The policy includes the government intervention through the Revolving Fund Management Agency (LPDB) at the Ministry of Cooperatives and microcredit program (KUR) provided by shariah banks for the micro, small and medium enterprises.

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