Co-owners,

We've spun the wheel for the Emerging Markets bucket. We pick at random and the ticker has landed on a bank right after we covered another one last week. This one could hardly be more different, and the contrast turned out to be the interesting part.

Last week, in Singapore, we met UOB: the regional bank that moves money across ASEAN borders. This week the wheel landed in Jakarta, on a bank that does almost the opposite. It stays home, inside a single country, and wins by being the everyday account that an entire nation transacts from.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns since inception in 1986 as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1957 in Indonesia. Listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in 2000.

First, the country, because the whole story rests on it.

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country on earth, behind India, China, and the United States. Around 288 million people, spread across some 17,000 islands. The median age is about 30. More than half the population already lives in cities, up from a fifth in 1980. It is the largest economy in Southeast Asia, and it has been growing at roughly 5% a year. A young, urbanising, fast-growing nation of nearly 300 million people, most of whom are still early in their financial lives.

Now picture the bank that holds the everyday money of 34 million of those people. That's BCA.

A few key facts:

BCA was founded in 1957 by Liem Sioe Liong, the man behind the Salim Group, one of Indonesia's great business empires. For four decades it grew into the country's largest private bank, an early adopter of ATMs and computerised banking, woven tightly into the Salim conglomerate.

Then it nearly ceased to exist.

In 1997 the Asian Financial Crisis tore through the region. The Indonesian rupiah lost around 80% of its value. In May 1998, amid riots and the fall of President Suharto, BCA suffered the thing every bank fears most: a run. Depositors crowded the branches, demanding their money back, all at once. Within days the bank had hemorrhaged a third of its deposits. It couldn't survive on its own. The government stepped in, took it over, and ended up owning around 93% of it.

A bank that has watched its own customers besiege its doors does not forget the feeling. Almost everything BCA became afterwards, the caution, the fortress balance sheet, the obsession with stable money, traces back to those few days in 1998.

The government nursed it back to health and floated it on the stock exchange in 2000. Then, in 2002, came the deal that defined the modern company. The Hartono brothers, Robert Budi and Michael Bambang, owners of the Djarum clove-cigarette empire, bought a controlling stake for around IDR 5.3 trillion. It was a contrarian bet on a wrecked bank in a battered economy. It became one of the great acquisitions in Asian business history. The family still owns about 55% today, and BCA is the centerpiece of their fortune, the largest in Southeast Asia. Michael Bambang Hartono died in March 2026, at 86. The clove on the cover of BCA's annual report is a quiet nod to where the money came from.

Most banks make money the obvious way: borrow at one rate, lend at a higher one, keep the difference. To do that they need deposits, and deposits usually cost something. Banks compete for your savings by paying interest.

BCA barely has to.

Of the IDR 1,249 trillion that customers keep at BCA, around 84% sits in current and savings accounts that pay next to nothing. The banking term is CASA, current account and savings account. The reason people leave their money there, untempted by higher rates elsewhere, is simple: BCA isn't where they save. It's where they transact. It's where the salary lands, where the rent goes out, where the QR code gets scanned at the warung, the little corner shop, down the street. The account is too useful in daily life to bother moving.

That gives BCA the cheapest funding of any major bank in Indonesia. And cheap funding is a quiet superpower. It's why the bank can lend conservatively, keep its bad-loan ratio down near 1.7%, and still earn a 23% return on equity. While other banks fight over depositors, BCA's deposits show up on their own, every payday, and stay.

The transaction habit is the moat. And the numbers behind it are staggering. In 2025, customers ran more than 40 billion transactions through BCA's mobile and internet banking, up 17% in a year. 99% of all transactions are now digital. Two apps do most of the work: the older, simpler BCA mobile, and the newer myBCA, which has roughly doubled its users in a year and now handles QR payments, foreign-currency pockets, wealth products, even payments from a smartwatch. Around 55% of new accounts are opened entirely online.

Every one of those taps deepens the habit. Every deepened habit cheapens the funding. Every cheapening of the funding widens the gap between BCA and everyone else.

For all the talk of deposits, it is still a full bank, lending IDR 993 trillion across four segments.

Corporate is the largest at nearly half the loan book, and the fastest-growing, up 11.5% in 2025. BCA is one of Indonesia's key lenders for national infrastructure: toll roads, mining, telecoms, water treatment, and the electric-vehicle battery supply chain that the country is racing to build.

Consumer lending is mortgages, personal loans, and car loans, sold through events like the twice-yearly BCA Expo. 

Commercial and SME lending serves the mid-sized businesses and the small entrepreneurs who, in a country like Indonesia, are the real economy. BCA wraps these loans together with cash-management tools and runs empowerment programs for small merchants.

Around it all sits a sprawl of services: the Tahapan savings account, a household name for decades; the Flazz tap-to-pay card that helped push Indonesia toward cashless; blu, a standalone digital bank for younger customers; Ocean, a new platform for business clients; plus Sharia banking, insurance, brokerage, and auto finance through subsidiaries. There's even a detail that hints at the ambition: in 2025 BCA became the first conventional bank in the world to earn an international management certification for its use of artificial intelligence, which it now leans on for fraud detection and credit decisions.

It hasn't been a comfortable year for the share price. The stock is down roughly 40% from its 2024 high, trading around IDR 6,100 as we write, against a peak near IDR 11,000. A few forces are pressing at once.

Indonesia's central bank cut interest rates sharply through 2025, and lending rates have been falling faster than the cost of deposits, squeezing the margin on every loan. Foreign investors have been pulling money out of Indonesian markets amid global tension. And loan quality has softened in one specific corner: car loans. Cheaper electric vehicles, many of them Chinese, are pushing down the resale value of conventional cars, which makes the collateral behind an auto loan worth less than it used to be. If that sounds familiar, it's the same force we met when we covered Astra International, the company that put Indonesia on wheels. The cheap EVs squeezing Astra's car business are quietly denting BCA's car-loan book too. BCA has responded by pulling back on auto lending and setting aside more for bad loans.

None of it has touched the foundation. Its safety buffer, the cushion of its own money it holds against losses, sits at nearly 30%, around triple what regulators require. Bad loans are still near 1.7%. The deposit franchise grew 13% in the year. Management is guiding to faster loan growth in 2026 and has been buying back shares. This is a long-term compounder going through a soft patch, not a business in trouble. We don't have a view on whether the lower share price is a bargain or a fair reflection of slower growth ahead. That's not what we're here for.

There is a particular irony in what BCA became. The worst thing that can happen to a bank is a run, a crowd at the doors demanding their money back faster than the bank can hand it over. BCA lived through exactly that, in full public view, and nearly died.

Its answer, over the next 25 years, was to become the safest, most boring, most-used bank account in a country of nearly 300 million people. The place you don't think twice about leaving your money. The opposite of a bank you'd ever want to run from.

If you own a global or an emerging-markets index fund, you own a piece of that. A slice of the everyday financial life of one of the largest, youngest, fastest-growing nations on earth, banked by an institution that learned the value of trust the hardest way there is.

Data and images sourced from BCA Annual Report 2025 and BCA Q1 2026 Corporate Presentation. Share price and market cap as of late June 2026. 

Sidenote: we have not seen a 603-page (!) annual report before. 🤯

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Next week, we'll be looking at a company from North America.