Indonesia’s Business Chief Pitches Travel Cards and Payment Rails to Unify BRICS Markets

NEW DELHI, Investortrust.id — Speaking before a high-profile assembly of world leaders on Friday, September 11, 2026, the chairman of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin), Anindya Novyan Bakrie, urged the BRICS economic bloc to turn geopolitical momentum into tangible operational relief for everyday enterprises. Addressing the Leaders’ Session of the BRICS Business Forum 2026 at the Bharat Mandapam convention complex in New Delhi, Bakrie warned that high-level multilateral pacts risk falling flat unless micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) can seamlessly pitch clients, fulfill contracts, and collect payments across borders.

The high-stakes room gathered key heads of state, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Their collective presence reflected a concerted push to rebalance global trade architecture toward emerging economies.

For Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation and a pivotal entrant into the expanded bloc, the summit marks an inflection point. As emerging market powerhouses look to circumvent traditional Western clearing networks, the core challenge shifts from diplomatic alignment to commercial execution.

“When we speak of BRICS, we are speaking about nearly half the world’s population, roughly 40% of global economic output, and nearly a quarter of international trade,” Bakrie told attendees on Friday, September 11, 2026. That systemic scale, he argued, brings an institutional obligation to distribute the dividends of growth far beyond state-backed conglomerates and resource extractors.

The Service Multiplier

Bakrie challenged the conventional divide between manufacturing capacity and commercial services, framing professional services as the linchpin of modern industrial strategy. Advanced factories depend on an extensive network of specialized inputs, including systems engineering, trade finance, industrial software, cross-border logistics, and operational compliance.

To illustrate the dynamic, Bakrie pointed to Switzerland. Despite lacking domestic gold reserves or large-scale agricultural acreage, the alpine nation refines approximately two-thirds of the world’s gold and manages nearly 60% of global metals trading through sophisticated technical, legal, and financial services. BRICS economies, he argued, must cultivate their own high-margin service ecosystems around their raw resource bases rather than outsourcing secondary value capture to legacy financial capitals.

For Jakarta, bridging services and industry dovetails directly with President Prabowo Subianto’s flagship economic agenda. The administration has staked its domestic mandate on resource nationalism and mineral "downstreaming"—a policy framework requiring domestic processing of commodities like nickel and bauxite rather than exporting raw ores—alongside substantial investments in healthcare infrastructure and human capital development.

A Three-Pronged Commercial Blueprint

To turn ambition into actual trade flow, Bakrie laid out three actionable priorities for member states:

First, he called on the BRICS Business Council to methodically audit the cross-border bottlenecks strangling daily commerce and submit concrete regulatory remedies directly to national cabinets. These measures should center on harmonizing professional licensing standards, standardizing corporate registration protocols, and removing mobility barriers. Central to this pitch is a proposed BRICS Business Travel Card, modeled conceptually on the APEC business credential, designed to grant expedited business travel and multi-entry access for executives and technical specialists across member states.

Second, member nations must bridge their national clearing and settlement architectures. India, Brazil, and China collectively account for roughly seven out of every 10 real-time payment transactions globally. Bakrie argued that harnessing this domestic throughput into unified, cross-border settlement rails would slash currency conversion spreads, bypass cumbersome correspondent banking fees, and accelerate counterparty clearing.

He reiterated support for settlements denominated in local currencies where commercially viable, cautioning that sovereign monetary resilience should not devolve into economic autarky. The proposal mirrors ongoing discussions among BRICS finance ministers and central bank governors in New Delhi seeking to enhance real-time transaction interoperability across member states.

Third, Bakrie advocated for structural commitments to human capital and digital infrastructure. He recommended that BRICS Business Council chapters publicly disclose annual workforce reskilling metrics, with an emphasis on machine learning and artificial intelligence literacy for small enterprise vendors. Multilateral institutions such as the Shanghai-based New Development Bank, he noted, should broaden their lending mandates to fund regional server capacity, fiber networks, and industrial vocational academies.

The Bandung Legacy Revisited

Bakrie maintained that Indonesia’s entry into BRICS must not degrade into a passive consumer market for foreign industrial exports. Instead, Jakarta seeks co-authorship of the bloc's supply chain policies, ensuring foreign ventures build local technical capacity, specialized engineering talent, and domestic industrial output.

“A workshop in Surabaya, a boutique supplier in São Paulo, an engineering bureau in Durban, or an exporter in Alexandria must all be able to locate buyers, deploy expertise, and clear invoices reliably across the BRICS perimeter,” Bakrie said. “That operational ease is the true acid test of meaningful integration.”

Invoking the spirit of the historic 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung—where post-colonial states established the Non-Aligned Movement—Bakrie positioned modern South-South commercial ties as the contemporary continuation of that diplomatic legacy.

“Indonesia stands ready to help build those practical conduits,” Bakrie stated in closing. “Let us ensure the economic future we envision within BRICS is one that delivers durable prosperity to all our citizens.”