The availability of access to formal financial institutions can serve as the catalyst for economic empowerment and improve the household asset ownerships. However, the Global Financial Inclusion Index shows that only 50 percent of adult population have individual or joint financial accounts and more than 1.5 billion of adult population do not have formal accounts and access to basic financial products. The results of Household Balance Sheet Survey 2011 conducted by Bank Indonesia also show similar conclusion for the case of Indonesia. Only 43.47 percent of the surveyed households have saving account in bank. Moreover, the numbers of households that have loan from banks are very low, reaching only 19.58 of the surveyed households.
In many literatures, financial inclusion is often identified as inclusion from banks where financial inclusion is seen as the process to provide banking services to low income population with affordable cost. This process of financial inclusion need to eliminate all types of barriers on financial access.
To overcome the obstacles in improving financial access, the Government of Indonesia has conducted several financial inclusion programs as one of the development tools. Bank Indonesia, in particular, has started the National Strategy for Financial Inclusion in 2010 as part of strategic steps to improve financial inclusion in Indonesia.
To improve the effectiveness of existing financial inclusion program, and at the same time designing the steps to formulate policies in financial inclusion, the availability of valid data on inclusion level of the society is a must. It needs a sustainable effort to collect and update the data to ensure its usage in formulating financial inclusions’ policies. One of these efforts is through the updating of basic and comprehensive Indonesian financial data.
DEFINIT was appointed by Bank Indonesia to carry out the financial data updating survey through Baseline and Comprehensive Data Collection to Individuals and Households in Indonesia in 2013. The objective of the survey was to update the data on micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) or households that has economic activity at MSMEs level in all provinces in Indonesia covering 12.000 respondents for baseline survey and 400 respondents for comprehensive survey. The respondents of this survey were divided into 5 groups based on assets ownerships, i.e. assets ownerships up to Rp100 million, assets ownership of Rp100 million to Rp200 million, assets ownership of Rp200 million to Rp500 million, assets ownership of Rp500 million toRp1 billion, and assets ownership above Rp1 billion. The survey was conducted through face to face interview and phone interview. It is expected that through this survey basic data on financial condition of the respondents can be obtained, especially related to financial inclusion.