Bank Indonesia to leverage real-time data to better shape policies

Bank Indonesia is leveraging real-time data from platforms including online portals, social media, internet search data and satellite images, in a bid to help better shape its policies.The move will also see Bank Indonesia signing agreements with the nation's four largest e-commerce players, two automotive companies and six property companies to obtain such granular information, according to The Jakarta Globe. Marketing Interactive has reached out to Bank Indonesia on details about these companies.Currently, the central bank relies on official data compiled by the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) from its own surveys or data, the report said. Additionally, Bank Indonesia faces challenges gathering accurate information within a short time frame, as it has a population of 260 million people that are dispersed across over 17,000 islands.Bank Indonesia's deputy governor Erwin Rijanto said solely relying on published data from BPS will cause it to be heavily dependent on the time the surveys are taken. With big data, however, the central bank is able to predict consumer behaviour within any sector to predict economic growth.The central bank's head of statistics, Yati Kuniarti, added that data will also allow the bank to create a daily job vacancy index using the data collected from online job portals. This will allow it to get a sense of the property market through online property advertisements. Yati said these data sets will be the real-time "leading indicators" to show the economic performance of Indonesia,the report read.