Indonesia’s Bank BRI will offer two trillion rupiah (US$143.8 million) of working capital loans through the peer-to-peer lending platform Investree. A large portion of this among will be dedicated to assisting entrepreneurs in the creative sector.
The loans will be offered via invoice financing, where the borrower’s accounts receivable form the basis of each loan. Investree will conduct a credit scoring analysis for each loan application before getting approval from Bank BRI to release the funds.
According to Indonesia’s Chamber of Commerce, as well as industry estimates, the local creative sector contributed a huge portion to the national economy in 2019. This creative sector typically includes handicrafts, design, fashion, architecture, culinary arts, and advertising.
The main issue with regards to the creative sector is that these types of businesses typically do not have the physical assets such as land or machinery to put up as collateral for a bank loan. This ultimately results as a huge missed opportunity to utilise the potential of the sector.
As such, this is what Bank BRI hopes to improve through the collaboration with Investree.
“We know there is a gap between banks and several business sectors in Indonesia. We need to work with fintech companies so that we can reach more people, especially MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) in the creative sector,” said Bank BRI’s director of digital technology and operations Indra Utoyo.
Up until this point, Bank BRI had disbursed more than 200 billion rupiah in loans on Investree. Thanks to the use of a proprietary artificial intelligence and alternative credit checking methods, it has been able to achieve a zero percent non-performing loan rate thus far.
