Why did LINE Bank choose to launch its services in Indonesia? Plans are already underway to make its entrance in Japan.Īsian Banking & Finance spoke with Kim to learn more about their venture in Indonesia and LINE Bank’s outlook for the future of mobile banking in the country. The digital bank is already active in Thailand, where it has 3.4 million users as of October 2021 and in Taiwan, where it recently celebrated its one-year anniversary and boasts of a 1.4 million customer base. Indonesia is the third market that LINE Bank operates in. “LINE’s advanced digital technology and KEB Hana Bank’s retail banking experience will prove to be the future of the banking industry, demonstrating a new financial model that begins in Indonesia,” Kim said.

In just a year, the neobank has already set a solid foundation for its Indonesia operations, with 350,000 customers as of March 2022 across the 19,000 islands that make up the country, Jihyun Kim, lead of LINE Bank Indonesia biz team at LINE Financial Plus, told Asian Banking & Finance. LINE Bank had acquired a 20% stake in KEB Hana Bank Indonesia in 2018. The bank was borne out of a collaboration between LINE Financial Asia–an affiliate of Japan and South Korea co-owned company LINE Corporation–and PT Bank KEB Hana Indonesia, a subsidiary of South Korea’s Hana Bank. Instead, Indonesia released digital banking guidelines in mid-2021 that allowed digital banks to be built from scratch, through partnerships and acquisitions, or through reorganising current players into neobanks.Īmongst the newest players who eagerly entered the market is LINE Bank by KEB Bank. Indonesia did not approach digital banking with the same fanfare its Southeast Asia peers did: there were no new digital bank licenses created and no dramatic selection and culling from a pool of competitive bids. After successful launches in Thailand and Taiwan, LINE is going steady in Indonesia.

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