On 20 August 2026, CRIF brought together leaders from government, banking, energy, industry, and technology in Jakarta for CRIF Forum Indonesia 2026, part of our CRIF Forum 2026 regional series, which began in Manila and continues across Asia in the months ahead.
The day opened with ministerial remarks on trade and competitiveness, moved through energy, AI, and supply chain resilience, and closed with a keynote on beneficial ownership. Across seven sessions, one idea came through consistently: trusted data is not a technical feature. It is a business foundation.
Trade, Investment, and Indonesia's Competitiveness in a Fragmented Global Economy
Dyah Roro Esti Widya Putri, Vice Minister of Trade, Republic of Indonesia, opened the programme with a picture of an economy holding steady amid global uncertainty. GDP growth reached 5.11% in 2025 and accelerated to 5.61% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, supported by a trade surplus of roughly USD 41 billion and exports approaching USD 283 billion.
She framed Indonesia's trade strategy around three pillars: protect exporters within international trade rules, diversify beyond traditional markets into the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and compete by finalising comprehensive economic partnership agreements with markets including Canada. Government's role, she said, is to open doors. It is the private sector's role to walk through them.
Trusted data ran through the address as a strategic asset in its own right, informing government policy and trade-barrier monitoring on one side, and risk assessment, market intelligence, and supplier verification on the other. With SMEs contributing more than half of national GDP, the Ministry's revamped export portal and its export-readiness tools are designed to help smaller businesses compete internationally with the same confidence as larger exporters.
Powering Indonesia's Growth Agenda: Energy, Investment and Competitiveness in a Changing World
Satya Hangga Yudha Widya Putra, Technical Advisor to the Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources, ESDM, placed energy security at the centre of Indonesia's growth story. With more than 200 million people spread across 17,500 islands and 30 provinces, the country's resource endowment, from oil and gas to nickel and gold, sits alongside a structural challenge: Indonesia has been a net oil importer since 2004, and fossil fuels still account for roughly 80% of the energy mix.
The transition agenda is not new. Legislation supporting the shift toward renewables has been in place for more than a decade, working toward Net Zero by 2045, the 100th anniversary of Indonesian independence. Around this sits an industrial strategy built on nickel processing, battery manufacturing, and smart-grid development.
His central point echoed the morning's opening theme: investment confidence depends on transparent, stable conditions and accurate, integrated data. Risk analytics, ESG reporting, and SME credit profiling were named as the tools investors and policymakers alike now expect as standard.
Decision Confidence in "The Great Tension" Era
Moderated by Rini Satriani, Senior Vice President and Economist at Indonesia Eximbank, this executive dialogue brought together Mikhael Lalwani, Founder and Group CEO of CORIM Group; Anne Patricia Sutanto, Head of Trade at APINDO; and Oki Stefanus, Partner at EY-Parthenon Indonesia Strategy and Transactions, for a candid conversation about leading through geopolitical fragmentation, currency volatility, and cautious bank credit.
Regulatory unpredictability came up as an acute pressure point, with panellists noting how sudden policy shifts can upend labour-intensive sectors overnight. The discussion drew a sharp line between technical problems, which a consultant can solve, and non-technical problems, which demand leadership judgment. Ryanair's approach to hedging fuel costs ahead of geopolitical shocks was cited as a model of proactive risk management rather than reactive damage control.
The panel was clear that data investment is a differentiator, not a cost centre, pointing to the shift from manual distribution data toward unified data systems as a competitive necessity. Even so, the group agreed that intuition still has a place at the top table. When the data is complete but the decision remains unclear, senior leaders combine logic, data, and judgment. The panel closed on an optimistic note: global supply chain realignment gives Indonesia a genuine opportunity to establish itself as a Tier 1 export node, provided business stays proactively engaged with policymakers rather than waiting for certainty that may not arrive.
Industry Outlook: Indonesia 2027, Risks, Opportunities, and Growth Drivers
Dian Ayu Yustina, Economist and Department Head of Macroeconomic and Financial Market Research at Bank Mandiri, took the room through a forward-looking read of Indonesia's growth trajectory. Government consumption is emerging as the dominant growth engine, up 21% in the prior quarter and projected to rise a further 50% in the current one, offsetting private consumption that has remained close to flat. Manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing were flagged as the sectors carrying the greatest multiplier effect on household purchasing power.
Headwinds remain real: export growth has slowed by roughly 8% year-on-year, oil prices sit near USD 90, and inflation is holding near the upper edge of the target band. Yet the overall assessment was one of an economy in a phase of overshooting pressure that is rebalancing in an orderly way, supported by credit quality that remains stable, with non-performing loans at roughly 0.8%.
Looking to 2027, the base case is 5 to 6% GDP growth, with downstream industrialisation, energy, logistics, and consumer sectors identified as the practical lenses for capital allocation, and balance-of-payments data flagged as the indicator worth watching most closely.
AI and Data-Driven Transformation: From Experimentation to Business Impact
Eric C. Listyosuputro, Partner at EY-Parthenon Indonesia Strategy & Transactions, moderated a roundtable with Beatrice Pravinata, Head of Consulting at NTT Data; Indra A. Sanjaya, Chief Risk Officer at Bank Neo Commerce; and Timothy Valentino Astandu, CEO and Co-Founder of Populix, on what it actually takes to move AI from pilot to production.
The consensus was candid: most Indonesian organisations remain in the experimentation stage, and AI is still too often treated as a boardroom buzzword rather than a tool embedded into end-to-end decision-making. The panel argued that competitive advantage will not come from access to AI technology, which is now broadly available, but from disciplined application to specific, high-value use cases: credit decisioning, document processing, early-stage collections that preserve a human tone, and consumer-insight simulation validated against years of proprietary data.
Governance, data quality, legacy-system integration, and management mindset were named as the real constraints on scale, particularly for financial institutions that require full documentation and auditability before AI can touch a regulated decision. The practical advice for organisations at any stage: build in a sandbox separated from production, prioritise use cases by economic value, break large initiatives into smaller funded workstreams, and define what success looks like before deployment begins.
Building Resilient Ecosystems Through Visibility and Collaboration
Erik Ridwan Santoso, Managing Partner at PT Synectics One, moderated a panel with Indar Barung, CEO of PT Semen Indonesia Logistik, and Sulaeman, Managing Director of Business II at Indonesia Eximbank, on closing the gap between the data banks hold and the data that actually describes the real economy.
Both panellists agreed the core issue is not a shortage of data but its quality, usability, and comparability across ecosystems. Where direct information is unavailable, utilities, sector benchmarks, and proxy indicators help fill the gaps, alongside early-warning signals such as sudden changes in payment terms or declining order volumes. The panel pointed to practical models for extending this discipline to smaller businesses, from anchor-company supplier programmes that flag unreliable partners early, to direct engagement with smaller exporters to help them build sustainability standards and responsible sourcing practices from the ground up.
The closing message was one of shared responsibility: building resilient ecosystems requires collaboration across sectors and countries, and trust that is earned through reliable, transparent information across the full value chain, not through relationships alone.
Trusted Business Starts with Trusted Ownership
Dr. Andi Taletting Langi, Director of Business Entities at the Directorate General of AHU, Ministry of Law, closed the forum with a keynote reframing beneficial ownership transparency as a strategic advantage rather than a compliance box to tick.
The regulatory foundation is substantial. Presidential Decree No. 13 of 2018 established beneficial ownership disclosure as a governance tool, and Law No. 1 of 2022 on Criminal Procedure extended direct accountability to beneficial owners who hide behind nominee shareholders. As of May 2026, more than 2,097,000 corporations had submitted ownership data, though the Ministry's own figures put true active compliance among genuinely operating corporations at only 6%, underlining how much work remains.
The government's posture is shifting from passive registry to active verification, backed by Ministry of Law Regulation No. 2 of 2025 and a data-intelligence hub now under development that will share real-time ownership data across eleven partner ministries and agencies. For businesses and investors, the payoff is direct: faster onboarding, lower risk premiums, stronger investor confidence, and better access to procurement, foreign investment, and international partnerships.
Across seven sessions and a full day of conversation in Jakarta, a few things became clear.
Organisations that are building well are not waiting for perfect conditions. They are investing in visibility into their trade relationships, their energy transition, their supply chains, and their ownership structures, and they are building the data infrastructure that makes fast, informed decisions possible.
They are also treating trust not as a compliance outcome but as a design principle. In trade, in energy, in AI, in supply chains, in corporate governance, trust is built before it is needed, not retrofitted after the fact.
Thank you to every speaker, moderator, panellist, and attendee who made CRIF Forum Indonesia 2026 a success. These are the conversations that move things forward.
