With the establishment of the national payment gateway Gerbang Pembayaran Nasional (GPN), banks need to distribute new debit cards that work using the gateway to help their customers reduce inter-bank transaction costs.
The debit cards with GPN’s red eagle logo will be available to the public in January, said BI Governor Agus Martowardojo on Monday, adding that the new cards were accepted by all merchants’ automated teller machines (ATMs) and electronic data capture systems in Indonesia.
However, BI transformation program head Onny Widjanarko said the GPN cards could not to be used for international transactions such as withdrawing money from foreign ATMs or processing payments in international stores.
Onny said old debit cards could still be used, but interbank transactions will result in higher costs.
Agus said banks charged a 2 to 3 percent fee if customers used other bank’s debit cards, but with the new cards the rate would only be about 1 percent.
He said currently there were 140 kinds of debit cards in Indonesia and 90 percent bear foreign switching network logos.
Meanwhile, transactions using debit cards in Indonesia reached Rp 17 trillion (US$1.26 billion) per day.
