When Financial Intermediation Changes Its Face
For decades, assessing the health of Indonesia’s financial sector was relatively straightforward: examine bank credit, third-party funds, non-performing loan ratios, and capital adequacy. That map is now changing. By mid-2026, bank credit had penetrated to IDR 9,081 trillion. Yet simultaneously, online lending reached IDR 105.14 trillion, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) financing by finance companies surged 57.02% to IDR 13.40 trillion, while bank BNPL hit IDR 30.7 trillion, growing 33.54%. Pawnshop financing reached IDR 162.26 trillion with 54.47% growth. Capital market investors surpassed 30 million, and crypto asset users reached 22.69 million. The financial system is not merely growing; it is changing its architecture.
Indonesia’s intermediation historically relied on banks: gathering funds, extending credit, managing risk, and serving as the main gateway for economic financing. This role has not disappeared. However, surrounding it, finance companies, online lending (pindar), securities crowdfunding (SCF), financial service aggregators, alternative credit rating agencies, capital markets, digital assets, and tokenisation are all expanding. The question of stability has therefore changed. It is no longer sufficient to ask whether each institution has adequate capital and liquidity. What is increasingly important is how risk transfers and amplifies through relationships between institutions, markets, platforms, data, and technological infrastructure.
Banking performance remains robust. As of June 2026, bank credit grew 12.67% year-on-year to IDR 9,081 trillion, with investment credit soaring 24.9% and corporate credit 20.45%. Gross NPL fell to 2.09%, Loan at Risk was 8.47%, CAR stood at 23.70%, and ROA was 2.47%. However, credit grew faster than deposits, which increased 10.21%, indicating that expansion is using liquidity space more intensively, though liquidity ratios remain well above minimum thresholds. The message is not that banks are being replaced. Banks remain the anchor, but they are no longer the sole node of intermediation. The system is moving from a bank-centric structure towards an increasingly diverse and connected financial ecosystem.
The transformation is more fundamental at the level of relationships between actors. The asset management industry’s AUM reached IDR 1,025.12 trillion, while SCF has collectively raised IDR 2.01 trillion. In the digital layer, 24 Innovative Technology-Based Financial Service (ITSK) providers have built 1,347 partnerships with financial institutions. Financial service aggregators have 18.80 million users, while alternative credit rating agencies received 24.46 million credit score data requests in June alone. Data has become part of the intermediation infrastructure. In the traditional model, most of the value chain resided within a single institution. Now, that chain can be disaggregated: one platform acquires consumers, another provides data and credit scoring, a financial institution provides the balance sheet, while transactions are settled through different infrastructure. Efficiency increases, but so does risk complexity. A disruption to a technology provider, cloud service, aggregator, custodian, algorithm, or platform can affect many institutions simultaneously.
Indonesia has taken a fundamental step through integrated supervision, allowing various financial service sectors to be supervised within a more unified institutional framework. However, the system’s transformation demands the next evolution: network-based supervision. This approach does not replace prudential supervision of each institution but adds a network dimension: mapping who is connected to whom, through what instruments, using whose infrastructure, where exposure concentrations lie, and how a shock to one node can propagate. A bank, finance company, or fintech may each appear healthy individually. But if many institutions depend on the same funding source, asset, technology provider, custodian, or algorithm, a concentration risk can emerge that is invisible when examining entities in isolation. The evolution of supervision thus moves from entity-based supervision, to integrated supervision, and is now enriched with network-based supervision that maps interconnectedness and risk transmission across the entire financial ecosystem.