Hundreds of Indonesian capital market entities, including securities firms and investment management firms, sealed on Tuesday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Home Affairs Ministry to utilize a citizen database to ease the registration process for new capital market investors.

Financial Service Authority (OJK) commissioner for capital market supervision Nurhaida said the access to such data would help speed up the making of the so-called Investor ID from three days to only 15 minutes, which is hoped would attract more people to invest in the capital market.

“With the help of the civilian database, our investor ID data will be more accurate and faster to make,” Nurhaida said during the MoU signing ceremony.

Home Affairs Ministry director general for population and civil registry Zudan Arif Fakrulloh said that 97 other institutions had also signed a similar MoU. Among the institutions that most frequently use the ministry’s citizen database are the Healthcare and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) and state-owned lender Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI).

"We gave them access to [the database] so that they can crosscheck data from their customers,” Zudan said, adding that the process would need less than a minute.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s most-populated nation, is home to more than 250 million people. The citizen database, Zudan said, had so far included 95.8 percent of the population.