About Bank BRI

Bank Rakyat Indonesia is one of the largest banks in Indonesia and is committed to increasing financial inclusions among un-banked Indonesians. Bank BRI specializes in using modern digital banking to facilitate microfinance lending across its network of over 10,000 branches and thousands of branchless agents.

Google Cloud Results

• Contributes $50M in revenue through the Apigee monetization feature
• Wins recognition for best digital bank in Indonesia from The Asian Banker in 2019
• Achieves ISO 27001 information security for open APIs, earning distinction as the only bank in ASEAN to receive certification to date
• Reduces partner onboarding from 6 months to under 1 hour with Apigee developer portal

Bank Rakyat Indonesia is making waves in Asia with its award-winning digital strategy. As a government-owned bank, Bank BRI is dedicated to changing the lives of its customers through accelerating financial inclusion across Indonesia. With an aggressive target of 84 percent of Indonesians participating in the banking system by 2022, Bank BRI is leapfrogging fintech competition thanks to its innovative digital strategy that has APIs at its core. By the end of 2019, Bank BRI expects to have reached a 70 percent financial inclusion rate among the country’s population, in part due to the adoption of the Cloud Apigee API Management Platform as the bank’s digital nucleus.

Transforming a legacy into a digital future

In the banking business, trust is essential, not only between the bank and its customers, but also between the bank and its partners. Recognizing that gaining and maintaining this trust would be key to customer and partner adoption of the new Bank BRI products and services, the bank decided to pursue ISO 27001 certification in 2018, becoming the first bank in ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) to become certified as information security compliant. Now the international community of partners and customers who use the bank’s APIs have yet another reason to place their trust Bank BRI.

“Apigee has become the central nervous system for all communications between the digital core banking, the microservices, the frontend, and the apps. Apigee has become our sun. Everything rotates around Apigee.”—Kaspar Situmorang, Executive Vice President, Bank Rakyat Indonesia

Kaspar Situmorang, Executive Vice President of Bank BRI, had the original vision for how the bank could transform itself into a fintech with digital technology and APIs. His team got started by implementing a web-native frontend over a new technology stack with Apigee as a second layer. This was a big change from the legacy technologies that existed when Situmorang joined the bank in 2017. Previously all of the bank’s products had their own public APIs, which were very difficult to manage, secure, and monetize.

Since deploying Apigee, it’s become much easier to manage the entire API lifecycle. Situmorang’s digital bank team of 15 uses the Apigee monetization and developer portal features while managing and securing APIs and conducting big data integrations. Apigee has become Bank BRI’s center of communications, handling all transactions between the bank and third parties.

Whereas previously it could take up to six months to onboard a new partner using host-to-host and VPN technology, now it takes less than an hour for partners to self-onboard using the Bank BRI Apigee developer portal. On the portal, partners can register, browse APIs, test in the sandbox, and go into production — all in less than an hour.

“Apigee has become the central nervous system for all communications between the digital core banking, the microservices, the frontend, and the apps. Apigee has become our sun. Everything rotates around Apigee,” says Situmorang.

Increasing financial inclusions

With more than 10,000 offices across Indonesia, Bank BRI has the largest network of any bank in ASEAN. The bank is also the biggest microfinance lender in the region. Though already present in even the most far-flung corners of Indonesia, Bank BRI is still working on increasing financial inclusion among un-banked Indonesians. With 56 million people that haven’t accessed banking services, Indonesia is in the bottom four countries for financial literacy in the world, along with Bangladesh, India, and China. It’s estimated that there is up to $8.3 billion in currency being held outside the banking system.

In order to reach this mostly rural, subset of the population, the bank launched Agent BRILink, a nationwide network of branchless agents. These agents can open new accounts, take deposits, pay out withdrawals, and process and disburse loans in under two minutes with the Pinang microfinance mobile app. To date, over 30,000 customers have received loans through Pinang. Handling its own risk-scoring and automatic payroll deductions for payments has translated into less risky and more profitable loans for Bank BRI.

“Customers download the app and scan their ID, capturing their credit score in just a few seconds. The digital offer letter says how much they’re approved for. They can then accept it, go to the approval screen, and do facial recognition. The money is disbursed immediately. GCP has transformed us into a fintech.”—Kaspar Situmorang, Executive Vice President, Bank Rakyat Indonesia

BRILink agents are bank customers who have been scored highly for reliability by the bank’s big data analyses and who maintain a minimum balance of around $800. Combining this data with the Google Maps API, Bank BRI is able to score all 75.5 million of its customers and identify which of them should be recruited as agents for underbanked areas. Since 2018, the bank has been able to appoint more than 200,000 branchless agents using the Agent BRILink app, eliminating the need for logistically challenging face-to-face meetings. This has resulted in an increase in loan volume from branchless business from $15 billion in 2017 to $26 billion in 2018.

To enable branchless agents to sign up new customers and provide banking services, all they need is a mobile phone and internet service. With many parts of rural Indonesia not covered by commercial 3G, Bank BRI has overcome this hurdle by operating its own satellite. With the connectivity the satellite guarantees, branchless agents can help customers obtain microfinancing and open new shops and businesses in all parts of the country. The satellite also provides internet service across the APAC region wherever the bank operates, from Sri Lanka to New Zealand. While it might seem unusual for a bank to operate a satellite, it’s reflective of Bank BRI’s commitment to reaching its financial inclusion targets and meeting its customers wherever they are.

“Pinang was created to win against fintechs trying to compete against us on speed, cost, and security,” says Situmorang. “The truth is that Indonesian regulators closed about 650 fintechs, mainly in the peer-to-peer lending space, because they were unsafe, too expensive, and very slow.”

Using APIs to create and monetize new products

Another way that Bank BRI is leveraging Google Cloud Platform solutions is through an innovative use of the Cloud Vision API, which enables the bank to integrate with the Indonesian government ID database. Identities of new customers — whether they’re coming in via a branch, a BRI Link Agent, or a mobile app — are automatically verified in seconds through facial recognition. With instant credit scoring and identity fraud concerns essentially eliminated, the bank can make more confident lending decisions.

“Monetization is very important to us. It enables us to define our pricing based on API calls and bill automatically based on usage. We’ve already recognized $50 million through the Apigee monetization feature.”—Kaspar Situmorang, Executive Vice President, Bank Rakyat Indonesia

“Customers download the app and scan their ID, capturing their credit score in just a few seconds,” explains Situmorang “The digital offer letter says how much they’re approved for. They can then accept it, go to the approval screen, and do facial recognition. The money is disbursed immediately. GCP has transformed us into a fintech.”

Bank BRI sees a bright digital future, in part thanks to the API product marketplace it’s creating to serve fintechs. With its digital technologies and massive customer base, the bank is sitting on a treasure trove of big data. Bank BRI already packages this data through more than 50 monetized open APIs for more than 70 ecosystem partners wanting to do credit scoring, business assessments, and risk management. Fintechs, insurance companies, and financial institutions don’t have the talent or the financial resources to do quality credit scoring and fraud detection on their own, so they are turning to Bank BRI.

“Monetization is very important to us. It enables us to define our pricing based on API calls and bill automatically based on usage. We’ve already recognized $50 million through the Apigee monetization feature,” says Situmorang.

Bank BRI is meeting and surpassing the goals it has set for itself for digitalization, increasing financial inclusion, and creating new revenue streams with APIs.

“Nude” comes in all shapes, sizes and colors. But for Ade Hassan, finding undergarments to match her skin tone took more effort than necessary. Born in the U.K. to Nigerian parents, Hassan searched unsuccessfully for underwear and swimwear that matched her skin—a problem that continued to frustrate her through college and into her professional life. 

“My nude isn’t the nude I see in shops,” Hassan says. 

Like many other black entrepreneurs, she created her own solution. Hassan founded Nubian Skin, a company that sells lingerie, hosiery, and swimwear for women of color.

With shades like “cafe au lait” and “berry,” Nubian Skin products reflect diverse skin tones and are sold in shops located in the U.K., Nigeria and the U.S., as well as online. Beyoncé and her dancers even asked Nubian Skin to outfit them for their  2017 “Formation” tour. 

Since nearly the beginning, Hassan has used G Suite to keep her business humming.

From managing meetings with retailers and manufacturers, to coordinating publicity efforts with fashion press, to keeping track of retail invoices, G Suite has helped Hassan scale her business as quickly as people have demanded her products.

“There are so many pitfalls and so many things that are hard about business,” Hassan says. “It’s really amazing to have something like G Suite that is easy and intuitive.”

Nubian Skin’s fashion fame arrived seemingly overnight. When Hassan posted the company’s first campaign images, its Instagram followers jumped from 50 people to more than 20,000 in just a few weeks.

“People called asking, ‘Can we have the contact for the press department?,” says Hassan. “But at the time, it was just me.” To easily handle media requests, she set up a press@nubianskin.com email address through the G Suite Admin console. And because she had used Gmail for several months before launching the company, using the business version of Gmail came naturally.

“Having that nubianskin.com address gave the business an air of professionalism, which we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” Hassan says. “Usually you need a whole IT department to set up new emails and passwords, but the Admin console removes the hassle of that process.”

Because Nubian Skin employees aren’t always in the showroom together, they need to be able to access business documents—like model photos and customer invoices—from anywhere.

To help, Hassan securely stores business documents in Google Drive (which can be accessed on mobile, too) and works collaboratively with her finance team to process orders using Google Sheets.

“Everyone has access to the spreadsheet so we can fill in what we need at any given point,” says Hassan. “This way, nothing slips through the cracks.”

And when she needs to connect with colleagues quickly or face-to-face, she uses Hangouts Chat or Hangouts Meet. Chat makes it so employees are only a message away, and Meet helps her connect with people as if they’re in person at the office.

Five years after launching Nubian Skin, Hassan is a recognized entrepreneur who’s influenced other retailers to create more inclusive designs.

“Even if you’re small, you want people to see you as a professional business,” Hassan says. “If you’re still growing, you need the building blocks to get you where you want to be. I can’t imagine working without G Suite.”

In June, we shared our vision for navigating the future of hybrid work with a single connected experience in Google Workspace. Now, as many of our customers begin to embark on their own hybrid journeys, I wanted to share how we’re helping them bridge the gaps in this new way of working.

A dedicated place for team collaboration: Spaces are now live

Spaces are the central place for team collaboration in Workspace and starting today, Spaces are live for all users. Spaces are unique in that they are tightly integrated with Google Workspace tools like Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and Tasks, providing a better way for people to engage in topic-based discussions, share knowledge and ideas, move projects forward and build communities and team culture.

We hear from our customers that they’re continuing to work across a broad range of locations and working hours, and that Spaces can be a central hub for collaboration, both in real time and asynchronously. Instead of starting an email chain or scheduling a video meeting, teams can come together directly in a Space to move projects and topics along, whether it’s a team of 10 for “2022 Roadmap Planning” or a team of 1,000 for the “Company-wide All-Hands.”

With Spaces, teams can share ideas, collaborate on documents, and manage tasks from a single place. Because all their work is preserved for future reference, team members can easily jump in and contribute at a time that works best for them, seeing a full history of the conversations, context, and content along the way. Using Spaces has already helped my own team, which is spread across time zones and varied in its working styles. It’s been helpful to rely on Spaces to retain and structure foundational knowledge, whether it’s for onboarding a new teammate or preserving context when someone moves to a new role.

We’re just getting started with Spaces and I’m excited to share a little more about where we’ll take it next. 

In the coming months, our users will see: 

• Streamlined navigation: A flexible user interface helps users easily access their inbox, chats, Spaces and meetings—all from a single location—so they can stay on top of everything that’s important.
• Discoverable Spaces: Spaces and their content can be made discoverable to all members of an organization, so other people can find and join the conversation. Administrators can also set discoverability as the default for their organization.
• Enhanced search: Allows users to easily find content from within and across Spaces, or even discover new Spaces to join. “Search everything” in Spaces opens up powerful new collaboration possibilities and makes it easier to access the team’s collective knowledge base.
• In-line topic threading: The ability to reply to any message within a Space fuels deeper discussions and collaboration across teams and organizations.
• Robust security & admin features: Tools for content moderation, managing Spaces, and establishing the right rules for healthy communication across domains and companies.

Making meetings more hybrid friendly

Spaces will play an important role in laying the groundwork for meetings and, in some cases, reduce the number of meetings a team needs to gain alignment. Having a dedicated space for asynchronous collaboration, with access to all the right content and context, will help teams be more deliberate about scheduling meetings. This is top of mind for us and many of our customers given the rise in meeting fatigue over the last 18 months. But when having a meeting genuinely feels worthwhile, the experience of transitioning into (and out of) it from different collaboration touchpoints should be seamless. 

Over the past few months, in collaboration with many customers and across teams within Google, we developed a handbook for navigating hybrid work that includes best-practice blueprints for the five most common hybrid meeting types. Because meetings are a foundational piece of hybrid work, our goal is to make them as productive, immersive and inclusive as possible. 

Scheduling meetings that work across the entire team

With hybrid work, many teams—my own included—have locations and working hours that can change daily. When many of us were together in the office, we might have tended to schedule meetings at a time that favored the “in-office majority,” but now it’s especially important to schedule meetings that scale across the entire distributed team. 

Now, beyond indicating their virtual or physical presence when accepting meeting invites, team members can set their location for each work day in Calendar. When combined, these capabilities allow meeting organizers and on-site support teams to plan for the right mix of in-person and virtual attendance. They can also provide greater visibility and help set expectations across hybrid teams.

Making meetings more spontaneous

Remember when you’d casually bump into a colleague in the office hallway or a break room and start a conversation that sparked new ideas? That’s perhaps the thing I’m looking forward to most as more of my team plan their part-time return to the office. These casual encounters were always a great way to build relationships and learn about topics that might not come up in structured meetings. To help enable these spontaneous connections when teammates aren’t in the office together, we’re bringing Google Meet calling to Workspace.

Google Meet calling is a seamless experience of initiating a video or audio call between one or more participants, complementing more structured, scheduled video meetings. Our intention is to bring Meet calling to all the natural endpoints in Workspace where you’d initiate an ad-hoc call including chats, people cards, and Spaces, but this will come first to one-to-one chats within the Gmail mobile app. Soon I’ll be able to call members of my team directly from a one-to-one chat. This will ring their device running the Gmail mobile app and send a call chip to our chat on their laptop, so they can easily answer from any device. It’s not quite the same as a spontaneous hallway conversation, but it might be the next best thing in a hybrid setting.

Ensuring collaboration equity in hybrid meetings

How do we ensure that hybrid meetings aren’t two meetings in one, divided between those in-person and those who are remote? Effective hybrid meetings need a unified experience so that the people sitting together in the same room can interact with their remote colleagues seamlessly, without it ever feeling like there are two parallel conversations.

We designed Companion mode in Google Meet to specifically meet this challenge and we’ll start rolling it out to customers in November. With Companion mode I can host or join a meeting from within a conference room using my laptop while leveraging the in-room audio and video—and it all happens without any awkward audio feedback. This functionality lets me share content or see presentations up close on my own device, access the meeting chat and whiteboard, initiate and vote on polls, or post a question in Q&A, just as I would from home. And to ensure that users have greater choice over how they participate in meetings, live-translated captions will be available in Meet and through Companion mode by the end of the year. We’re currently working on translating meetings in English to French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, with many more languages coming in the future.

Expanding choice and flexibility for meeting hardware

While Companion mode keeps people in the room seamlessly connected to their remote colleagues, meeting hardware plays a crucial role in making hybrid meetings feel more immersive and human, with the ability for everyone to be clearly seen and heard. To provide more flexibility and choice on this foundation of how we come together in a hybrid work world, we’re announcing an expanded Google Meet hardware portfolio and interoperability with other conference room solutions.

First, we’re announcing two new all-in-one video conferencing devices to complement our Series One Room Kits. The Series One Desk 27 is an all-in-one 27” device that’s perfect for small shared spaces or your desktop, either in the office or at home. Series One Board 65 is an all-in-one 65” 4K device that can be paired with an optional stand for ultimate configuration flexibility—turning any room or space into a video collaboration hub in minutes. 

Both devices feature collaboration capabilities with the Jamboard app built right in, and each can be used as an external display. While optimized for Google Meet, USB-C connection from your laptop gives you the flexibility to use the meeting app of your choice while leveraging the high-fidelity audio and high-definition video on Series One Desk 27 and Board 65. You can learn more about these devices developed in partnership with Avocor through our on-demand webinar starting at 9 AM PT today.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/BR81EAce5BQ?enablejsapi=1&

We’re also proud to announce new third-party devices coming to the Google Meet hardware ecosystem. Google has certified the Logitech Rally Bar Mini and Rally Bar for Google Meet, which provide complete room solutions for small and mid-sized rooms. You can learn more about these Google Meet-certified products in Logitech’s September 21 webinar. Additionally, the Rayz Rally Pro is a new mobile device speaker dock by Appcessori that will automatically launch Google Meet for video meetings and provide an improved audio experience from your mobile device.

Certified Google Meet hardware ensures high-quality video and audio in meetings and is easy to deploy and manage. You can view our full Google Meet device portfolio and purchase directly from approved resellers by visiting the Google Meet Hardware website. 

While Google Meet customers enjoy a full-featured experience on Meet hardware, we realize they sometimes need to connect with people outside of their video calling network. To enable this, organizations can use Pexip for Google Meet to seamlessly join Meet meetings from the widest range of third-party video conferencing solutions. Today, we’re also announcing support for bidirectional interoperability with devices from Webex by Cisco and Google Meet hardware. Soon you’ll be able to launch a Google Meet meeting on Webex hardware and a Webex meeting on Google Meet hardware. Calling interoperability between Meet and Webex is supported on Series One Board 65, Series One Desk 27, and the rest of the Google Meet hardware portfolio, as well as Webex Room Series, Room Kit Series, Desk Series and Board Series. We expect general availability later this year. You can find more details here. We plan to give Meet users even broader calling interoperability with support for other conferencing services in the near future. 

Navigating hybrid work is a journey

We’re thrilled to bring these new Google Workspace experiences and devices to our customers, but we also realize that navigating hybrid work will be a journey of learning and adaptation for every organization. Two resources we recently developed can help along the way:

• Navigating hybrid work: A Google Workspace handbook
• The newly launched Future of Work site from Google Workspace, where you can keep up with all the ways work is changing.

Bridging the gaps in the emerging hybrid work world will necessarily be a combination of technology, workplace culture, and reimagining the use of physical spaces. But developing a “hybrid-first” mindset starts with the tools people use every day to connect, create, and collaborate, and Google Workspace will continue to play a crucial role in that evolution.