On my second day as a credit analyst at Halsworth Asia Bank in Singapore, Thailand floated the baht. It was July 1997. I was twenty-two, I had finished a business degree at Kentwell University a month earlier, and I had been hired partly because I could read Indonesian financial statements and talk to the people who prepared them. Within a year the rupiah had lost most of its value against the dollar, and the bank's Indonesian corporate book, which had looked conservative that June, held dozens of borrowers who could no longer service dollar loans from rupiah revenues.
01 / Credit quality through the cycle in MSME lending
02 / Funding mix and deposit behaviour
03 / Branches, agents and the app as one network
04 / Scams, mule accounts and customer friction
05 / Working with OJK, Bank Indonesia and LPS
06 / Governing a family-controlled listed bank
Total assets
Rp 94.6tn
Bank Kartadana, June 2026; loans Rp 64.8tn, 62% to MSMEs
Loan at risk
21.4% → 10.2%
December 2021 to June 2026, after re-underwriting pandemic restructurings
Current and savings accounts
31% → 46%
Share of third-party funds, 2021 to June 2026
I run a bank for small businesses on the principle that bad news about credit, funding or fraud should reach the boardroom while it is still cheap to act on.
I am President Director of PT Bank Kartadana Tbk, a bank listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange and controlled by the family that founded it in Surabaya in 1989. We lend mainly to micro, small and medium enterprises: traders in provincial markets, small manufacturers in East and Central Java, rice millers in South Sulawesi and the distributors who sit between them. At June 2026 we held Rp 94.6 trillion of assets and Rp 64.8 trillion of loans, 62% of them to MSMEs, with 10,200 colleagues, 306 offices and about 6,900 branchless-banking agents. I lead the Board of Directors under the supervision of a Board of Commissioners on which the founding family and independent commissioners both sit.
I joined a Singapore bank's credit department in July 1997, the week the Asian financial crisis began, and spent four years restructuring loans to Indonesian companies whose dollar debts had outgrown their rupiah revenues. I then ran commercial credit for the same bank in Jakarta, built its regional small-business credit models from Singapore and, from 2012, led micro and small-business lending at a Jakarta bank through the 2015 commodity downturn. I came to Kartadana in 2017 as director of risk management and in June 2021 became its first President Director from outside the founding family.
The questions I work on are the ones a bank for small businesses cannot avoid. How early should we admit that a restructured loan will not recover? Which deposits will stay when rates move? How far should we close offices when our customers still run on cash? How much friction will customers accept to protect them from scams? And how does a family-controlled bank say no to its own shareholder? Each answer has cost us something, and I set the cost beside the result.
Restructured loans faced before the relief ended
In late 2021 I asked our commissioners to re-underwrite Rp 11.8 trillion of pandemic-restructured loans and to cut the dividend payout from 45% to 15%. When OJK's relief ended in 2024, that book was Rp 2.9 trillion; loan at risk is now 10.2%, down from 21.4%.
Transaction accounts instead of rented balances
Current and savings accounts rose from 31% to 46% of third-party funds between 2021 and June 2026, built through QRIS merchant acquiring and payroll for MSME clusters, while special-rate time deposits fell by Rp 6.4 trillion.
A smaller network that stayed in rural markets
We closed or merged 58 urban offices rather than the 120 our advisers proposed, turned 41 rural cash offices into lending posts and added 2,300 agents. The saving was Rp 172 billion a year, not Rp 410 billion.
Scam losses cut by more than two-thirds
After we began holding first transfers from newly registered devices in 2024, customers' reported scam losses fell from Rp 87 billion in 2023 to Rp 26 billion in 2025. We reimbursed Rp 14.2 billion where our own controls had failed.
Current focus
Before my term ends at the 2027 annual general meeting I am working on three things: preparing two internal candidates for the nomination process our commissioners will run, tying the dividend recommendation to loan-at-risk and capital thresholds so that the next downturn does not reopen the 2021 argument, and building mule-account data sharing with other mid-sized banks so that an account we close cannot simply reopen next door.
Conversations I welcome
I will not seek a third term. From mid-2027 I intend to return to Singapore and hold two or three non-executive roles in Singapore, Malaysia or Indonesia, in payments, digital banking or non-bank lending to small businesses, where I would not compete with Kartadana. Until then I hold no position outside the bank. I accept a few speaking invitations each year.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
PT Bank Kartadana TbkPresident Director; member of the Board of Directors since 2017 · February 2017–present
PT Halsworth Multifinance IndonesiaNon-executive member of the Board of Commissioners · 2009–2012
Formation
Bachelor of Business Administration in banking and financeKentwell University · 1997
Master of Management (part-time)Pradipta Graduate School of Management · 2005
Grace brings the committee the loans she is worried about before the ones she is proud of. In 2021 she asked us to cut a dividend the family was counting on, and she gave us the collectors' view of the restructured book, not only the business's. We were better commissioners for it.
Ratnasari WidjojoIndependent Commissioner and chair of the Risk Monitoring Committee, PT Bank Kartadana TbkThe full record ↗
Contact
I will not seek a third term. From mid-2027 I intend to return to Singapore and hold two or three non-executive roles in Singapore, Malaysia or Indonesia, in payments, digital banking or non-bank lending to small businesses, where I would not compete with Kartadana. Until then I hold no position outside the bank. I accept a few speaking invitations each year.
