Bank Mandiri and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), each the largest in respective country, set up here on Friday a remittance payment service aimed at facilitating customers to make payments to China.
According to the cooperation agreement, the two banks will provide payment service in both Chinese currency "yuan" and U.S. dollars for customers to pay their counterparts in China according to the customers' own choice and needs in even flexible and faster manner.
Under the cooperation, by choosing yuan payment service to China, Indonesian individual customers have more choices by using rupiah to make yuan payment to China using a fixed exchange rate between rupiah and yuan or U.S. dollars and yuan.
Customers can also opt for China U.S. dollars payment service directly for the urgent needs, such as the requirement of same- time-zone same day value payment.
Bestowed with Bank Mandiri's vast customer base influence in the local market and ICBC service backup, the cooperation is expected to benefit more Indonesian customers with more service options.
The ICBC was approved in 2003 by SAFE, the Chinese Forex Regulation agency to provide Chinese Yuan payment service for overseas individual customers.
ICBC is the largest Renminbi (RMB) settlement bank in China and accounts fro around 46 percent market share in China. The Chinese largest bank's asset stood at 9.7 trillion yuan (around 1.43 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2008.
Meanwhile, the asset of Indonesia's Bank Mandiri stood at 181.6 trillion rupiah (about 18.1 billion U.S. dollars) as of mid this year.