Editorial: Thank you, Perry Warjiyo

The former BI governor shows the kind of reformist we need in Indonesia’s highest posts

Public sector reform in Indonesia often seems like a myth. Yet, true reform occasionally takes place, as we’ve seen in Bank Indonesia (BI) under Perry Warjiyo’s leadership. When he exited the governor post on 25 July after 8 years, the central bank bid farewell to one of its most consequential technocratic leaders.

His early departure comes as a shock, though it should not be surprising considering the familiar political theater. In May, a member of parliament demanded Perry’s resignation in a hearing amid volatile global markets and a plummeting rupiah. He was a convenient scapegoat, but currency fluctuations — driven by global capital flows and by investors’ trust — are not personal failures of the central bank governor.

But history will judge Perry not by the daily exchange rate ticker, but by the institutional resilience Bank Indonesia strengthened during his tenure.

The stability we took for granted

BI’s primary mandate (at least until the passing of the recent P2SK law) is very simple: to maintain the stability of the rupiah’s value, or to keep inflation under control. Under Perry’s watch, this mandate was executed with a masterclass in quiet discipline.

Think of the shock from the Covid-19 pandemic. Indonesia managed to navigate the storms of fractured global supply chains and disrupted economies without spiraling into hyperinflation. Through calculated measures, BI kept the macroeconomic ship upright. For instance, it successfully balanced the “burden-sharing” mechanism with the Finance Ministry without undermining their independence.

The political dividends of this stability are often underestimated. Much of the enduring public approval enjoyed by the Jokowi administration can be traced directly to kitchen-table economics: that ordinary citizens could still afford basic goods.

Contrast this with the political turbulence seen in Western democracies, such as the United States, in which the Biden administration suffered severe electoral and public approval battering primarily due to raging post-pandemic inflation, which eventually led to the second election of Donald Trump.

In Indonesia, consumers were largely spared that trauma. BI under Perry left the economy unscathed, proving that prudent monetary management is the ultimate social safety net.

The digital payments revolution

If keeping inflation under control was the bare minimum expectation for a competent central bank governor, the true and indelible legacy of BI under Perry’s leadership lies in our digital payments infrastructure.

For decades, developing countries have remained digitally “colonized” by foreign financial gatekeepers. Over the past decade, Bank Indonesia increasingly treated payment infrastructure as strategic national infrastructure rather than simply financial technology. The National Payment Gateway (GPN), for example, reflects that long-term institutional vision. While the GPN was conceived before Perry Warjiyo took the helm, it was under his tenure that the initiative was institutionalized into a nationwide payment backbone, keeping domestic debit transactions within the country and reducing reliance on international payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

The strategic foresight of this move cannot be overstated. One only needs to look at Russia — where Western sanctions abruptly severed citizens from international payment rails overnight — to realize how vulnerable a digitizing nation is without domestic redundancy. This means Indonesia built its own fire escape before the fire even started.

Then came the retail payment system BI-Fast and Standard National Open API Payment (SNAP), which systematically lowered friction, driving down transaction costs, and knitting a fragmented archipelago into a real-time financial ecosystem.

Yet, the crown jewel of this revolution is obviously the Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard, or QRIS.

In the early days of the digital wallet boom, private sector giants like GoPay, OVO, and DANA each introduced their own proprietary QR codes, threatening to fracture the market into competing walled gardens. The masterstroke of BI under Perry was not inventing the QR payment, but excellent regulatory coordination. QRIS transformed a chaotic corporate race into a unified public utility.

We wrote extensively about the QRIS reform here.

Today, QRIS bridges the entire economic spectrum: it powers high-end retail boutiques just as effortlessly as it empowers street-side bakso vendors. Adoption has scaled to such a degree that urban discourse has fundamentally shifted. We are no longer debating how we might expand financial inclusion to small vendors. We are now debating whether vendors should be allowed to only accept QRIS and not cold hard cash. This shift was not an accident of the free market. It was engineered through deliberate, long-term regulatory orchestration by BI under Perry’s leadership.

A reformist’s legacy

As Perry Warjiyo exits the central bank, he leaves behind a large pair of shoes to fill. He proved that a state institution can be both fiercely disciplined and radically innovative, defending the citizens’ wallets from global crises while aggressively launching the nation into a cashless future.

Amid the noise of political grandstanding and short-term currency jitters, the broader picture is crystal clear: Indonesia’s financial resilience today is built on the foundations he laid. BI under his leadership offers a rare example of reformist governance in practice. In a political environment often consumed by short-term pressures, that may ultimately be his most enduring contribution.