Bank Rakyat Indonesia has appointed Hery Gunardi as its new President Director following a vote at the bank's Annual General Meeting of Shareholders, known in Indonesia as the RUPST, held on 31 March 2025. Hery replaces Sunarso, who had led BRI through a period of significant post-pandemic credit recovery, digital platform investment, and continued expansion of the bank's micro and small business lending franchise, leaving behind a substantially larger and more technologically capable institution than the one he had inherited.
BRI occupies a distinct and strategically important position within Indonesia's state banking system through its long-established focus on serving micro, small, and medium enterprises across the country. Its network of branches, agent banking points, and digital access channels extends into rural and peri-urban communities where access to formal financial services has historically been limited, making the bank an instrument of national financial inclusion policy as well as a significant commercial enterprise in its own right. The choice of its chief executive therefore carries implications well beyond corporate governance.
HERY'S TRACK RECORD IN STATE BANKING
Hery Gunardi arrives at BRI with a high-profile track record earned at the centre of Indonesia's state-owned banking sector. He previously served as President Director of Bank Syariah Indonesia, the country's largest Islamic bank by assets, where he played a central role in orchestrating and managing the merger of three state-owned Islamic banking subsidiaries into a single consolidated entity. That integration exercise involved combining BRI Syariah, BNI Syariah, and Bank Syariah Mandiri into BSI, one of the most ambitious bank consolidation projects in Indonesian history, requiring the harmonisation of systems, staff, products, and customer relationships across three previously independent institutions.
His appointment to lead BRI signals that the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises, as the principal shareholder representative, places a premium on executives who have demonstrated the capacity to manage structural complexity and institutional transformation at scale. BRI has been investing heavily in its digital retail banking platform, known as BRImo, as well as in expanding its agent banking network under the BRILink programme, which uses local entrepreneurs as banking access points. Both initiatives require disciplined operational management of the kind Hery is expected to provide.
LEADERSHIP CHANGE AMID SECTOR TRANSITION
The RUPST at BRI was part of a broader wave of leadership change sweeping through Indonesia's state-owned banking sector in the first quarter of 2025, with parallel management transitions occurring at other government-controlled institutions during the same period. The government's appetite for refreshing senior leadership at its banks reflects a deliberate approach to installing executives aligned with its evolving economic priorities, including credit expansion to productive sectors, support for the national financial-inclusion agenda, and the continued build-out of digital banking infrastructure across the archipelago.
For BRI specifically, the incoming leadership inherits the challenge of sustaining strong loan growth and asset quality across a portfolio weighted heavily towards small-ticket borrowers whose repayment capacity is sensitive to conditions in agriculture, informal trade, and rural household incomes. These segments require specialised underwriting capability and granular portfolio management tools. Investors and analysts will be watching closely in the first few quarters of Hery's tenure to assess whether the bank's credit quality metrics remain well-managed as the leadership transition is absorbed by the organisation.