Singapore Banks in Indonesia (a.k.a Who owns Indonesian Banks?)

When Singaporean travelling around Jakarta these days, they will be feeling like at home country Singapore. Easily can they find Singapore bank's logo in every corner of the city. As information, only 6 locally-incorporated full banks are operated in Singapore, each has strong fundamentals. But banks live in that tiny country must expand in order to keep growing.

After some mergers and acquisitions in Indonesia banks since 2000, some local banks have been acquired by foreign capital investors (read as Singapore's). Before 2007, those acquisitions were still on paper-based and management levels. But you can see in recent years that those banks one by one is changing their logos to inline with their motherships.

• Bank Buana, taken by United Overseas Bank, now become UOB Buana.
  
• Bank NISP, taken by Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation, now become OCBC NISP
  .
• Bank Mitsubishi Buana, taken by Development Bank of Singapore (DBS Bank), now become DBS Indonesia
  
• Bank Danamon, taken by Asia Financial Indonesia (Deutche Bank + Temasek Singapore), still named Danamon.

Even Bank Niaga now merged with Bank Lippo to become CIMB Niaga, a subsidiary of Malaysia's Commerce International Merchant Bankers (CIMB) Group
.

And don't forget about failing acquisition of Bank BII by Maybank Malaysia from Singapore Temasek's Sorak Financial Holdings. So as a fact, BII is still controlled by Singapore company.

If we see this as business actions, yes it is for a good sake. Banking consolidation will reduce number of banks in Indonesia, stronger fundamental and capital, and so on.

But for Indonesian perspective, we see that we only have a few strong private local banks such as BCA which is owned by Farindo (Djarum Group).

Sigh...