Hope for the New OJK Commissioner

MARINA EKATARI

The Financial Services Authority has a new board of commissioners. Mahendra Siregar was elected as Chairman of the OJK Board of Commissioners for the period 2022-2027.

Financial services are growing fast and getting increasingly complex, demanding consumer protection, enforcement of the rules of the game and better supervision.

In recent years, the media has been filled with reports of consumer complaints that they have been disadvantaged by a number of financial service institutions. Starting from a failure to pay out life insurance policies to digital financial investment fraud that can cause financial losses of trillions of rupiah.

Therefore, the public has put very high hopes in the nine new commissioners of the Financial Services Authority (OJK), which is chaired by Mahendra Siregar. The new regulators were inaugurated on Wednesday. Mahendra, in his inauguration speech at the Supreme Court building, said that the first step in the OJK's work would be to encourage a one-stop system for licensing, ratification and approval of financial services businesses. Mahendra promised that the service would be faster while still adhering to precautionary principles.

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> Stimulating the Financial Industry

> Financial Inclusion for Justice

The statement by the chairman of the OJK board of commissioners for 2022-2027 implies that the OJK still has to implement a one-stop-shop system, which was the initial goal of the OJK's formation on 16 July, 2012. The OJK has the functions, duties and authorities to regulate, supervise, inspect and investigate financial services businesses after those functions were taken from Bank Indonesia (BI).

KOMPAS/ALIF ICHWAN

Busy atmosphere of officers and visitors at the Financial Services Authority office, Jakarta, some time ago.

The one-stop system is increasingly important to grow the national financial industry, as well as to ensure its supervision in an effort to recover the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic. The granting of licenses to new businesses or the development of existing financial services must be followed by monitoring the performance and compliance of financial institutions in carrying out good governance. There should be no subjective approach in supervision and investigation.

The OJK is required to be able to keep up with the development of the financial services industry, which is increasingly complex in its products, grows fast and knows no national borders. However, such supervision should also not curb the presence of financial service innovations because Indonesia must compete with other countries to attract financial investment.

On the other hand, there are holders of cryptocurrency, products created to be free from state regulations, independent of the existing financial system.

Society faces several situations at once. There are still people who are not connected to banking services or even refuse them. On the other hand, there are holders of cryptocurrency, products created to be free from state regulations, independent of the existing financial system.

In the future, there will definitely be developments whose direction cannot be imagined at this time.

We hope that the new OJK board of commissioners can truly carry out its functions, duties and authorities. We need healthy post-pandemic economic growth, protected from fraudulent practices and baseless speculation. Financial education for the public must be more aggressive to anticipate various offers of financial products that work across national borders.

The new OJK board of commissioners is required to play a bigger and more decisive role in ensuring that the financial services industry grows healthily and is not held hostage by fraudulent players that harm the public.

(This article was translated by Kurniawan Siswo)