What Is the Bangkok Blueprint? What It Means for Indonesia's Banks

What is the Bangkok Blueprint, and does it matter for Indonesia? On 14 October 2026, at their Annual Meetings in Bangkok, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group released the Bangkok Blueprint for Fraud-Resilient Financial Services, a framework to help countries prevent, detect and respond to cyber-enabled fraud in digital finance. It was developed in coordination with the Bank of Thailand. It does not create new rules for Indonesian institutions, but it sets out the shape of the response that regulators across the region are moving towards, and Indonesia's own fraud figures show why that response is needed here too.

What the IMF and World Bank released

According to the IMF's press release of 14 October, the Blueprint sets out 12 key considerations to help countries identify weaknesses and build coordinated responses. The IMF says countries are encouraged to adapt them to their own legal, institutional and market conditions, so the document reads as a reference model rather than a rulebook. The considerations are grouped under five pillars.

• Strategic and legal foundations: clear roles, accountability and legal powers for the authorities involved.
• The fraud-mitigation life cycle: safeguards from product design and prevention through detection, response and recovery, as The Nation described it.
• Existing risk-mitigation and enforcement frameworks: using the tools authorities already have to identify and stop fraudulent transactions.
• Domestic and cross-border cooperation: information sharing, joint action and the tracing of money as it moves between countries.
• Consumer protection and resilience: safeguards and public awareness so people can recognise fraud and keep using digital finance with confidence.

The Nation reported that the Bank of Thailand also produced a companion report, Bangkok Blueprint in Action: Regional Experience and Policy Lessons for Fraud-Resilient Financial Services, which draws on experience in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Indonesia is not one of the four economies it covers.

Why the institutions say it is needed

The IMF notes that INTERPOL ranks cyber-enabled fraud among the most threatening crimes globally, alongside drug trafficking and money laundering, and that fraud increasingly runs through social media, digital platforms, e-commerce sites and telecommunications networks. That is why the Blueprint calls for responses that cross sectors, not only banks. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said trust is the foundation of every financial system, and Bank of Thailand Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said the problem is one no country or institution can tackle alone.

Figures cited in The Nation's coverage put global fraud losses above US$442 billion in 2025, said cyber-enabled fraud cases had almost tripled over the previous decade, and said Asia accounted for 67% of global fraud losses in 2024. The report did not make clear who produced each estimate, so they are best read as indications of scale rather than precise measures.

What Thailand already does

Thailand used the launch to show its own model. The Nation reported that an emergency decree on technological crimes gives the legal basis for information sharing, rapid intervention, account suspensions and shared responsibility. Thailand also runs an Anti Online Scam Operation Center with a 1441 hotline and an initiative called Connect the Dots that links information held by different agencies. Thai financial fraud losses exceeded 43 billion baht in 2024 and fell to 32 billion baht in 2025, according to the same report. The Nation also stressed that the Blueprint does not promise that stolen money will be recovered or that victims will be refunded.

How Indonesia compares

Indonesia has its own central point for scam reports. The Indonesia Anti-Scam Centre, run by the Financial Services Authority (OJK), began operating on 22 November 2024. Kompas reported on 2 September 2026, citing Hudiyanto, Secretary of the illegal financial activities task force Satgas PASTI, that by 31 July 2026 the centre had received 637,055 reports, verified 1,179,881 reported accounts and blocked 607,210 of them. About Rp724.1 billion had been blocked and Rp204.3 billion returned to victims.

The pressure is rising with digital payments. ANTARA reported in June 2026 that, according to Bank Indonesia, digital payment transactions grew 37.69% year on year to 14.82 billion in the first quarter of 2026. At the same briefing, OJK warned that fraudsters increasingly use AI, and an official of the Indonesian Fintech Association described fraud detection systems as crucial infrastructure rather than a supporting feature. We found no public response from OJK or Bank Indonesia to the Bangkok Blueprint in the reports we read.

What financial institutions can prepare

This section is our analysis, not a summary of the Blueprint's requirements. The five pillars point to capabilities that banks, payment companies, fintechs and platforms will be asked about whatever form national rules take.

• Measure the time to act: how long it takes from a customer's fraud report to a hold on the receiving account, across your own systems and with other institutions.
• Check that fraud signals are available in real time to every channel, not gathered in a nightly batch after the money has moved on.
• Make case handling traceable: each report, verification, block and return of funds should leave an auditable record that can be shared with authorities.
• Prepare to share information with other institutions and agencies through secure, agreed interfaces, as anti-scam centres and cross-border cooperation grow.
• Review how products are designed: the Blueprint's life-cycle pillar starts at design, so new payment features should be assessed for fraud risk before launch.

What to watch next

Watch for the full Blueprint text and its 12 considerations, which will show how specific the expectations are on detection, information sharing and victim support. Watch whether OJK and Bank Indonesia refer to it in coming rules on fraud management and the anti-scam centre, and whether ASEAN authorities adopt common approaches to tracing funds across borders. In our view, institutions that can already move fraud signals between systems and partners quickly will be best placed for whatever version of the Blueprint each country adopts.