Exclusive: Jakarta City Hall sets out cashless vision

Jakarta will prioritise cashless payments to improve financial accountability, Vice Governor Sandiaga Uno announced at the recent GovPay summit.

The Vice Governor said the administration would use this technology to track government officials’ fuel consumption; cut fraud and inefficiencies in F&B establishments; and help citizens avoid late payments for electricity bills. “With cashless payments, it’s hopefully going to be eliminated,” he said.

Jakarta is the “only local government that was able to achieve cashless transactions” in Indonesia, he added. GovPay was the finance, tax, data and payments summit hosted by GovInsider on 23 January for 400 Governors, Mayors and Senior Officials from across ASEAN.

Jakarta will also prioritise transport, Sandiaga noted, as “we need to get more people to use public transport”. He noted how the two major rideshare companies in Jakarta, Grab and GO-JEK, transported a combined 1.5 million commuters a day. In contrast, Transjakarta and other public transport companies, which enjoy “close to $300 million worth” of subsidies a year, only transport “less than 500,000 commuters a day”.

In the next few years, Jakarta’s MRT and LRT train systems will be built, Sandiaga said. At the same time, the One Card One Trip (OK OTrip) programme, which is currently ongoing trials, will implement a single payment system for three modes of transportation: Transjakarta, Metro Mini buses and angkot (public minivans). With OK OTrip, each trip a commuter takes will cost a flat rate of Rp 5,000 (US$0.35).

Furthermore, an electronic road pricing (ERP) system will make it “very expensive and painful” for drivers of private cars to enter the city, with the intent of changing user behaviour. “You guys complain about traffic jams, but you continue the behaviour of using private cars and vehicles to come to the city,” Sandiaga pointed out.

Eventually, he hopes to reduce traffic congestion in the city and make it more conducive to pedestrians, which will “make the city more liveable”. The Jakarta administration will rely heavily on big data and analysis to make these decisions, he added.

Other GovPay highlights:

• Bambang Brodjonegoro, Minister of National Development Planning,outlined how the government’s One Data policy will support better decision-making.
• Yanuar Nugroho, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President, shared his plans for participatory government.
• A Dedicated Governors’ Panel saw Irianto Lambrie, Governor of North Kalimantan; Syahrul Yasin Limpo, Governor of South Sulawesi; and Alex Noerdin, Governor of South Sumatra, share their visions for their provinces to leap ahead.