Hideo Nakamura Indonesia is making a national payment system which will replace Visa and Mastercard in places like the government and certain businesses. This will help keep their money safe against “bad things” that may happen, said someone important from the bank. They hope it becomes popular soon.
Indonesia Rejects Visa and Mastercard
The head of a special department at Bank Indonesia announced that the country will soon be using a different kind of payment system instead of Visa or Mastercard. It is only going to apply to the state-owned companies and institutions so people still have the choice to use either Visa or Mastercard outside these places.
The president has a plan to create our national payment system, and it is going well. We expect that very soon everyone will be using it, even companies owned by the government.
The central banker said now was an excellent time to do this since Southeast Asia should create something which’ll protect people and businesses from any financial problems in the West.
In March, Indonesian President Joko Widodo suggested that to protect their transactions from something bad happening on the global scale, people in Indonesia should use credit cards from their own local banks instead of global ones.
Dodit Proboyakti, a board member of the Indonesian Credit Cards Association, told Sputnik publication that Indonesia wants to use the same ideas as Russia’s successful payment system called Mir. It became very popular during a time when other countries had put some big punishments on Russia (like not trading with them) because of something they did in Ukraine.
Bank Indonesia’s boss, Perry Warjiyo, has said that the country is moving away from using American dollars for trading and instead will use its own currency. Indonesia has also worked out agreements with countries like Thailand, Malaysia, China and Japan to all use each other’s money when they do business together.
Nine countries in Southeast Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) have all agreed that it is best if they use their own currencies for financial transactions. All these nine countries are part of an organization called the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
The BRICS nations (which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are leaders that will be meeting to talk about creating a common currency. People think that if this happens, then the US dollar won’t be as popular anymore. What do you think of Indonesia setting up their own payment system so they don’t have to rely on Western countries? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
