Bank Indonesia’s payment scheme, BI-FAST, powered by ACI Worldwide, confirmed plans to launch a varied real-time payment service in honor of its first anniversary, according to a press release.
“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,” said Leslie Choo, senior vice president, managing director – APAC, ACI Worldwide. “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.”
Since launching last December, BI-FAST has successfully helped 106 participants, 19 of which have benefits from ACI Worldwide’s multi-tenant Real-Time Payments Solution to connect to the system, and all of which make up 87% of the national retail payment market.
Allowing more than 100 payment schemes at one time, BI-FAST payment services will now offer bulk credit, direct debit and Request for Pay services “to continue expanding including additional multi-tenant aggregators, from the leading national switches of Indonesia,” a recent press release explains. “One of the multi-tenant aggregators, PT Rintis Sejahtera, has already gone live with the solution.”
These participants, along with multi-tenant aggregators, have committed to using ACI Worldwide’s real-time payments solution to connect to BI-FAST.
“The use of this consistent real-time payments solution will harmonize the country’s entire payments ecosystem and drive ongoing infrastructure efficiency,” a recent press release states. “The next phase will see BI-FAST expanding outwards to interconnect with other regional real-time schemes for cross-border payments, forming the region’s real-time payments network.”
The launch was carried out in just nine months, making it one of the fastest of its kind to ever be recorded. Once finalized, the scheme will incorporate 135 banks, merchants and payment service providers.
A recently released Prime Time for Real-Time report projected Indonesian real-time transactions to rise to 1.6 billion in 2026 to help generate an additional $747 million of economic output, which correlates with the country's projection to add 2.7% to formal GDCP by 2026.
ACI worldwide is also credited with powering ISO 20022 central infrastructure and all member bank ecosystems of Malaysia's RPP in real time, as well as the ISO 20022 bulk payment of Thailand’s National ITMX.