Indonesia plans to spend around $600 million opening bank accounts for 200 million people, according to the Jakarta Globe.

That works out at roughly three dollars a person. The number is small because the hard part of financial inclusion is not the account.

Why governments want people banked

Being outside the formal financial system is expensive. Cash wages cannot be saved securely. Credit comes from informal lenders at rates far above bank lending. Remittances cost more to receive. Insurance is largely unavailable.

For the state, the motivation is administrative as much as developmental. A population with bank accounts can be paid subsidies and social transfers directly, which is cheaper than distributing cash or goods and harder to divert. It also brings economic activity into view for tax purposes.

Both motivations are legitimate, and it is worth being clear that they are different. A programme framed as helping the poor save is also a programme that makes the informal economy legible to the government.

The dormancy problem

This is the finding that has reshaped how development economists think about financial inclusion, and it is the reason to read the Indonesian plan carefully.

Large account-opening drives elsewhere — India’s Jan Dhan Yojana is the most studied — succeeded spectacularly at opening accounts and much less well at getting them used. A substantial share sat dormant, with zero balance and no transactions, for years afterwards.

The reasons are practical rather than cultural. If the nearest branch or agent is an hour away, depositing small amounts is not worth the journey. If fees exceed the interest on a small balance, the account loses money. If income arrives in cash from informal work, converting it involves a trip. And if nobody you transact with accepts transfers, the account solves nothing.

An account is infrastructure. Whether it is used depends on whether the rest of the infrastructure exists.

Indonesia’s particular geography

Indonesia is an archipelago of thousands of inhabited islands spread across more than 5,000 kilometres. Branch networks are expensive to build and maintain at that dispersion, and always have been.

That is also why mobile-based financial services have grown quickly there and across Southeast Asia. A phone reaches places a branch does not, and agent banking — local shops acting as cash-in and cash-out points — has done much of the work that branches do elsewhere.

The measure of whether $600 million is well spent is therefore not how many accounts open. It is whether the agent network, connectivity and merchant acceptance exist in the places where the newly banked actually live.

What to watch

Two indicators separate a real programme from an announcement.

The first is whether the government publishes usage data rather than only account numbers — active accounts, median balances, transaction frequency. Account totals are easy to report and easy to inflate; usage is the harder and more honest measure.

The second is fee structure. Accounts with maintenance charges or minimum balances exclude precisely the people the programme is aimed at, and this is where inclusion drives most often quietly fail.

Indonesia is also weighing a related question about data: bringing 200 million people into a digital financial system creates a record of their transactions, and what protections attach to that record is a policy choice being made at the same time.

Sources

• Jakarta Globe, Indonesia Plans $600 Million to Open Bank Accounts for 200 Million People, 9 September 2026, via ISEAS Daily News on Southeast Asia
• Published evaluations of India’s Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana and account dormancy
• World Bank Global Findex material on financial inclusion measurement
• Research literature on agent banking and mobile money in Southeast Asia