BNI expands Cloudera partnership to advance secure AI banking

Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) is extending its partnership with Cloudera to accelerate the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) across its operations.

Through this collaboration, BNI aims to utilise Cloudera's open, hybrid data platform to streamline data ingestion, governance, advanced analytics, and machine learning in a unified environment. The bank is among the inaugural adopters of Cloudera AI Inferencing, an on-premises service based on NVIDIA NIM, allowing it to deploy open-source large language models with NVIDIA GPUs.

The programme is scheduled for full rollout by the end of 2025, with BNI, Cloudera, and NVIDIA jointly focusing on meeting regulatory compliance, maintaining system resilience, and optimising performance.

Regulatory compliance

Central to BNI's decision to adopt Cloudera's solutions is alignment with Indonesia's stringent financial regulatory standards. Cloudera's unified platform delivers data governance, end-to-end security, and deployment flexibility, supporting compliance with both the Financial Services Authority (OJK) and Bank Indonesia (BI) regulations. This infrastructure also enables BNI to meet its data sovereignty targets.

"We are proud to be among the first financial institutions adopting Cloudera's AI Inference service. This technology gives us the infrastructure to scale our generative AI ambitions securely and efficiently, while staying compliant with Indonesia's evolving regulatory landscape," said Toto Prasetio, Chief Information Officer at BNI."It's a major step forward in our goal to deliver smarter, faster, and more responsible digital banking services to Indonesians."

Cloudera's AI and machine learning capabilities, underpinned by an open-source framework, will allow BNI to efficiently and securely scale its predictive analytics, fraud detection, and personalised customer services.

Current AI applications

While the implementation of AI inferencing is ongoing, BNI has already been using machine learning for several applications:

• Product recommendation: Suggesting banking products to customers based on their transaction history.
• Supply chain analytics: Optimising material flows and vendor relationships to reduce operational risk and improve efficiency.
• Online gambling detection: Employing real-time monitoring and machine learning models to detect, freeze, and report suspicious activity. This supports Indonesia's national anti-gambling initiatives alongside agencies such as PPATK, Kominfo, OJK, and BI.
• Chatbot for product knowledge: Equipping staff with AI tools to provide timely information to customers.
• Churn prediction: Identifying potentially at-risk customers to proactively manage retention.

In particular, the online gambling detection initiative is executed in conjunction with Indonesia's Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK), Kominfo, OJK, and Bank Indonesia, reflecting multi-agency cooperation underpinned by advanced technology.

AI infrastructure and industry perspectives

Cloudera's AI Inferencing, combined with its data platform, is designed to operationalise generative AI at enterprise scale. This infrastructure is anticipated to help BNI remain resilient against evolving threats while providing insight-driven services to its customers.

"We are excited to deepen our partnership with BNI as they pioneer the next phase of AI-powered banking in Indonesia," said Remus Lim, Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan at Cloudera. "By adopting Cloudera's AI Inference and unified data platform, BNI is leading the way in securely operationalising generative AI at scale. This collaboration underscores our commitment to empowering Indonesia's financial institutions with trusted, scalable, and regulatory-ready AI infrastructure."

BNI's approach demonstrates a move towards modernising its data architecture. The emphasis is on secure, scalable AI deployment, which supports national objectives around compliance and local data management.