The Mercy Corps Blog

Blog Post Posted August 13, 2009, 11:37 am by Roger Burks

28 stories

View of Jakarta from Bank Andara's offices. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

To be completely honest, going into a tall bank building this morning was the most unnatural I’ve felt on this trip. In the neighborhood alleyways and along the village paths I’ve walked on other days here in Indonesia, I’ve been given easy smiles. I’ve fallen into fascinating conversations. I’ve explored with all senses.

The cold marble walls of skyscrapers lack the chaos and life of places like Penjaringan or Kalibaru. We pass through multiple security checkpoints, entering a world of distrust that — although warranted by recent events — feels anything but welcoming, unlike the villages we visited in Aceh. These are huge empty spaces; I prefer the intimacy of a home or the shade of a tree. We file into an elevator and others shuffle in after us, but no one talks, moves or looks around. I quietly make jokes with my friends Thatcher and Julisa as we’re lifted 28 stories to our destination.

I am underdressed, hair too long and shirt untucked. I feel like a curiosity in this world of bankers.

But, when I reach the top floor of this tower and meet some of the folks at Bank Andara, I realize we’re all doing our jobs for the same reasons: to help impoverished families overcome their challenges and build more prosperous lives. Our clothes and tools may be different, but we’re all in this together.

Mercy Corps founded Bank Andara in May 2008, with start-up funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to provide loans and financial services to Indonesia’s multitude of microfinance institutions (MFIs). There are an astounding 50,000 MFIs in this country, serving more than 40 million people, but about 50 million Indonesians still don’t have access to any banking systems. And millions of people around Indonesia really need access to life-changing assistance like this: nearly half of the country’s population lives on less than $2 a day.

Bank Andara’s goal is to infuse small, local and mostly-rural MFIs with sufficient capital to reach out to extremely poor families, offering them the chances that other banks couldn’t afford to give them.

Supriyono explains Bank Andara's various products and services to me. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

It’s fascinating, really, but I am no economist: I tell Supriyono, Bank Andara’s Product Development Head, that I only earned a “C” in that course in college. But I am not being fully honest. I actually failed Economics earlier in my schooling and had to retake the course.

The way Supriono explains everything makes perfect sense, though: he talks about how he envisions rural citizens conducting their banking through mobile phones. He discusses giving small MFIs the liquidity to expand their range of products and services. He foresees clients being able to pay their utility bills, health care costs and childrens’ school tuition through the bank accounts they could never even get before.

I talk with a couple of guys about centralized software systems that link clients, MFIs and Bank Andara in a true network for good. While I’ve heard about the development of Bank Andara for much of the last couple years, I’d never quite understood the technical specifications it would take to revolutionize the microfinance industry — but visionaries like Richard Maramis and Mulyono Junaidi, information technology specialists, are figuring out the best ways to connect hard-working people with opportunity.

I still won’t pretend to know things like differences in guaranteed lending rate between commercial and rural banks, but Bank Andara is on top of that. And, even though the gleaming corridors of a banking tower are far from my preferred habitat, it’s amazing to think that a banker on the 28th story of a Jakarta office building and a struggling mother in a tiny village can work together to change the world.