Bank Indonesia achieved gender balance in its policy-setting board with the appointment of its new deputy governor.
(Bloomberg) — Bank Indonesia achieved gender balance in its policy-setting board with the appointment of its new deputy governor.
Filianingsih Hendarta, 60, got the parliament’s approval on Tuesday to serve a five-year term starting April, succeeding Deputy Governor Dody Budi Waluyo who will retire. She’s a career central banker who started in 1986 and currently leads its Payment System Policy department.
Her appointment balances the scale in Bank Indonesia’s policymaking body, with men and women taking an equal number of seats in the six-person team. Hendarta will be the third female policymaker on the board, alongside Senior Deputy Governor Destry Damayanti and Deputy Governor Aida S. Budiman.
Only the Reserve Bank of Australia has more women on its board in the Asia Pacific, with female members outnumbering male colleagues 5-4.
“The result of this election is one of the manifestations that members of the Board of Governors are selected based on merit,” the central bank said in a statement. The decision is “regardless of ethnicity, religion and race,” it said of Hendarta, who becomes the first woman of Chinese descent to be named a BI deputy governor.
In her nearly four decades at the central bank, Hendarta has helmed the Monetary Management and Macroprudential Policy departments. She has also been at the forefront of Bank Indonesia’s push to develop and regulate digital finance.
Hendarta has been a pivotal figure in the central bank’s pioneering work in technology — still a male-dominated sector in Indonesia. She debuted the nation’s standardized Quick Response code in 2019 that paved the way for a boom in contactless payments during the pandemic. QRIS, as the platform is called, had 30 million users as of end-2022.
She launched Bank Indonesia’s Fast Payment system in late 2021 and recently led the central bank’s digital rupiah issuance plan called Project Garuda. She’s also overseen the formulation of Bank Indonesia’s Payment System Blueprint 2025 that aims to digitalize the financial sector and interlink the fintech and banking industries.
(Updates with parliament’s approval of appointment)
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