In the late 1990s, during the Asian Financial Crisis, the Indonesian banking sector essentially collapsed. The crash of the rupiah pulled back the curtain and revealed that the balance sheets of many banks were stuffed with bad loans. Many of them went under, or had to be rescued and recapitalized by the government. Four such failing state-owned banks were merged into a new entity in 1998, which was re-named Bank Mandiri. Today, Bank Mandiri is the largest bank in Indonesia with $138 billion in assets and net income in 2023 of around $3.9 billion.
Indonesia’s banking sector is dominated…
