Here we are, me and some of my friends from ForSEI (Forum Studi Ekonomi Islam) visited Bank of Indonesia which I located in 0 kilometer of Yogyakarta. Yup, it’s placed in the most crowded area of this culture and student city. The building was looked so amazing from the outside, everybody said that it was heritage from the colony, Dutchman.

It was the first time I visit that building. I often back towards in front of that building, but I never enter it even for once before, hehehe. I was so lazy for the first time. If not because my best friend asked me to accompany her, maybe I wouldn’t go at that time, hehe (dasar pemalas!!)

Not bad, I got pretty fair reward for fighting my laziness. Here are some informations that I got from our visiting study, some of them are new for me. Check ‘em out :

BI isn’t like a common bank which is being a mediator between the debtor and the creditor. But the obligation of BI is to supervise all of bank in Indonesia. (hellooooo pi, I think everyone has known about it).

There are five main rights of BI are : to make a rule, to give a permit or a policy, to supervise, and to give a fine if there’s a break of law.

Why is BI become an important institution in our country? Because more than 85% regulation money in Indonesia centralize in

The purpose of BI is to reach and to keep the balance of rupiah. So it will not being in too low or too high inflation. In short, to reach SSK (Sistem Stabilitas Keuangan).

iB is part of BI. iB is standing for Islamic Banking. So, just like BI which control all of the conventional bank, iB has the obligation to control all of the Islamic bank in Indonesia.

iB become important too because there are some reasons :

• For your information, the segment of Islamic bank market is about 3,43% until last 2010 with growth about 30%-40% each years.

• There’s only two kinds of bank in the world, conventional and Islamic bank. And Indonesia use both of the system because it has written in our law, (Undang-Undang exactly).

How exactly BI control all of the bank? There are two ways to supervise them, Passive and active system, Passive an Active. Passive means that BI do nothing but receive regularity report from common banks and check them out. Otherwise, active means BI must check the condition of the common banks directly, by sending some people to go there.

· But based on the principle, there are also two kinds to supervise the banks, compliance based supervision which is the condition f the bank is known only by it’s obedient to the law that mentioned and risk based supervision which is means using counted possibility that might be happen and the risk that might be got by the bank in the future. Indonesia used to use the principle, but after we got a big crisis in about 1997-1998 we use the second one to anticipate unwanted possibility.

· Basically, there are four differences between the conventional and Islamic bank, here we go :

1. The arrangement of management. There is DPS (Dewan Pengawas Syari’ah) in islamic banking which the conventional bank doesn’t have.
2. Conventional bank use fixed cost which called as interest to the customer, and the Islamic use profit and sharing to replace it. And it is one of the reason why the Islamic bank could survive in the middle of global crisis in ’98.
3. Islamic bank offer more variety product than conventional.
4. If conventional bank has BEI (Bursa Efek Indonesia) which located in Jakarta an Surabaya, Islamic bank has their own stock exchange called BES (Bursa Efek Syari’ah). All of the product which enter to the BES is only the product which signed as a “halal” product.

· When I ask how do exactly we know whether the bank is healthy or not, Miss Uun as the speaker explained to us that there are six point to measure it, CAMELS :

• C for Capital. As the rule that written in our nation law (and almost all of the country agree with it) that the minimum CAR of the bank is 8%, it’s means the minimum capital of the owner must be 8% of the total capital.
• A for Asset quality. The quality of asset which the bank have.
• M for Management. The system which is use to operate the bank.
• E for Earning. The ability of the bank to produce profit or gain to bank t self.
• L for Liquidity. Amount of cash money that available in bank, so the customer could take their money anytime they want to.
• S for Sensitivity of Market. Degree of sensitivity bank to their debenture, share or stock in the stock exchange.

· We were also talking about hot issue “OJK” or Otoritas Jasa Keuangan which purpose to control all of the money regulation in Indonesia, not only in banking but also in the others sector like BPR etc. But Miss Uun couldn’t talk more about it because it’s not her authority. She said that we should wait, listen and follow what the government said.

Ok, that’s what I’ve got from my visiting few days ago, hopefully it could be some advantages for you who read this posting. :)