Citibank resumes full services

Two years after it was mired in a couple of high-profile cases involving embezzlement and a suspicious death, Citibank Indonesia is relaunching its full services, saying stories in the media at the time were inaccurate.

“A lot of things that were reported were not true and we would like people like you [journalists] to actually tell the truth,” Citibank Indonesia chief country officer Tigor Siahaan told The Jakarta Post in a recent interview.

He was referring to media reports of the case involving Citibank’s former senior relationship manager, Inong Malinda Dee, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for embezzling her client’s funds.

Tigor insisted that his bank “was not the only one” involved in fraudulent practices here.

Following the case, Bank Indonesia — the nation’s bank regulator — banned Citibank from issuing new credit cards for two years.

This year, the US-based bank will officially relaunch its full-service operations in Indonesia and issue new credit cards starting in May.

Since Citibank’s involvement in the high-profile cases surfaced in 2011, BI had barred Citibank from signing up new customers for its premium wealth service for one year, opening new branch offices for one year and using third-party debt collectors for two years, on top of the two-year ban on issuing credit cards.

Citibank’s activities came under the spotlight after one of its credit card holders, Irzen Octa, died shortly after being detained and harassed by a group of debt collectors hired by the bank — the case came to light not long after Malinda’s embezzlement scandal became public.

Currently Citibank accounts for around 20 percent of total sales volume of credit card transactions in Indonesia, according to Tigor.

With his bank being barred from tapping new credit card customers, he acknowledged that the bank had been handicapped in competing in the business segment, but said that Citibank was ready to get back in the game.

“We took the opportunity to ensure that we deepened our relationship with our existing customers while offering them incentives, and developed further innovations,” said Tigor.

Among the innovations that Citibank formulated to tap new customers was linking the accounts and cell phones of its credit cardholders, enabling them to identify their transactions via their cell phones.

Learning from its bitter experience with using outsourced debt collectors, Citibank now employs its own team of debt collectors and all of them use phone calls when doing their job, with all of their conversations being recorded by the bank, said Tigor.

Citibank, despite its status as a foreign bank operating under branch status only and not as a legal entity (PT), was formerly one of the nation’s top banks, as it was the only foreign lender in BI’s list of top 10 biggest banks by assets in 2007 and 2008.

Being toppled from the top 10 ranking did not mean that Citibank’s financial performance declined, said Tigor, who explained that he had been steering his bank on to a more focused target market.

“We do not want to be a bank for everybody; we cannot be,” he said.

“What we want to do is to become the bank for the corporate sector, whether multinationals, local corporations, state-owned enterprises or emerging local businesses that value the globalization trend that is now occurring.” (

Satria Sambijantoro, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Business | Mon, April 08 2013, 11:56 AM)

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