TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – The Indonesian Financial Services Authority (OJK) expressed its support of the government's plan to establish the nation's biggest Islamic bank. "To face the ASEAN Economic Community, Indonesian banks must be able to distribute funds to infrastructure and corporations," OJK's director for licensing development regulation and supervision of Islamic banking, Ahmad Buchori, said yesterday.

According to Ahmad, the discourse to unify Islamic banks has been around since a couple of years ago. Several options offered include merger and establishing a new company altogether. "But I do not know how far the development progress is," he said.

Last week, SOE Minister Dahlan Iskan said that the business scale of several state-owned Islamic banks such as Bank Syariah Mandiri, BNI Syariah, BRI Syariah, and BTN Syariah, is still very small. "I am now looking for ways for us to have an Islamic bank that is bigger than Malaysia's," he said.

Secretary general of the Islamic Banking Society, Syakir Sula, said that the merging of Islamic SOEs' subsidiaries must be coupled with capital injection "so that the bank could have at least a status of Book III (having a core capital of Rp5 trillion to Rp30 trillion)."

A number of parties had stated their optimism that the national Islamic banking market can grow up to 6.23 percent this year. Two of the contributing factors to this growth are the high economic growth and the continuing improvement of Islamic banks' performances.

Last year, Islamic banks' financing value reached Rp184.12 trillion. The industry's ratio of bad financing was 2.62 percent, or equivalent to Rp4.83 trillion. OJK noted that as of February this year the assets of sharia banks and sharia business units had reached Rp180.36 trillion and Rp61.92 trillion, respectively.

TRI ARTINING PUTRI