Indonesia

The 31st annual Asiamoney Brokers Poll invited chief investment officers, fund managers and investment analysts to take part. Voters represented fund management houses, hedge fund & private equity firms, insurance companies and wealth management houses in Asia, Europe and North America.

Bank Mandiri’s chairman and chief executive tell Asiamoney how Indonesia and their bank will weather the coronavirus pandemic.

Perry Warjiyo, Indonesia’s central bank governor, may not be the country’s leader, but with Covid-19 ravaging the economy, the population of 273 million have more riding on him than on the president.

Erick Thohir once owned the Italian football team InterMilan. Now Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo has handed him one of the country’s toughest jobs: reforming creaking state-owned enterprises. If he succeeds, he could even get a shot at the presidency.

Mandiri Sekuritas

Anyone planning to stress test southeast Asia’s biggest economy could do worse than look at where Bank Central Asia finds itself today compared with 1997.

Mandiri Sekuritas, under the watch of president director Dannif Danusaputro, maintained its leadership in bond issuance in 2019, controlling nearly 17% of the market with a share worth $1.3 billion. It also brought nine Indonesian deals to the offshore market, worth a combined $2.3 billion.

Since 1968, Citi has pushed into an ever-expanding mix of sectors in Indonesia. It has gone further than its peers in commercial, consumer and corporate and investment banking. The ambition with which chief executive Batara Sianturi is branching out – and the way Citi is making a lucrative go of it – warrants this year’s best international bank honours.

In a more perfect world, the digital bank award would go to a purely local institution. Normally, we might shy away from honouring a name that is 94.1% owned by Japanese firm Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. But Bank Danamon’s strides, particularly in the coronavirus era, are hard to ignore.