Indonesia’s domestic real-time payments scheme BI-FAST, launched by Bank Indonesia and powered by ACI Worldwide, has announced plans to launch a wide range of new real-time payment services.
BI-FAST payment services will be extended to include bulk credit, direct debit and Request for Pay services.
Additionally, BI-FAST also expects its number of participants to continue expanding including additional multi-tenant aggregators, from the leading national switches of Indonesia.
BI-FAST has onboarded a total of 106 participants since its launch in December 2021, 19 of which through multi-tenant aggregators, representing 87% of the national retail payments market.
One of the multi-tenant aggregators, PT Rintis Sejahtera, has already gone live with the solution.
The next phase will see BI-FAST expanding outwards to interconnect with other regional real-time schemes for cross-border payments.
Bank Indonesia is already working with the central banks in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand to develop the cross-border QR payment linkages as part of the ASEAN-wide payments connectivity effort.
“ACI Worldwide is proud of the successful rollout of BI-FAST over its first year and the high onboarding rates among financial institutions and banks in Indonesia.
After just one year, BI-FAST is quickly enabling a completely new payments ecosystem in the country — accelerating the digital transformation of Indonesia’s economy, driving economic growth and bringing millions of unbanked citizens into the formal financial sector.”
said Leslie Choo, Senior Vice President, Managing Director for APAC, ACI Worldwide.
Bank Indonesia and ACI Worldwide were able to implement and launch BI-FAST in less than nine months.
The ACI Low Value Real-Time Payments technology driving Bank Indonesia’s central infrastructure hub allows more than 100 payment scheme players to connect.
When complete, the scheme will incorporate 135 banks as well as merchants and payment service providers.
ACI Worldwide powers the real-time ISO 20022 central infrastructure and all member bank ecosystem of Malaysia’s Real-time Retail Payments Platform (RPP), and real-time ISO 20022 bulk payment of Thailand’s National ITMX.