Dion Bisara – Despite government efforts, most households still lack savings accounts, according to a new central bank survey.

"We found that 62 percent of homes are without any kind of savings accounts," Muliaman Hadad, a Bank Indonesia deputy governor, said on Friday during a banking seminar in Jakarta.

Geography was the biggest challenge, Muliaman said. "Many people live in remote areas, so they don't have access to a bank. The distances are just too great," he said, adding that people also failed to get savings accounts because they lacked information about banking.

Muliaman said the survey findings seemed to affirm an earlier study by the World Bank, which found that about 50 million Indonesians had no access to the formal financial sector.

In fact, he said, for every 1,000 residents there were 514 term deposits in Indonesia, compared to 1,616 term deposits in Malaysia. "Our savings rate is still very low compared to other countries," he said. "There must be a scheme to help more people engage in banking."

In an effort to attract first-time bankers, the central bank last year encouraged local lenders to offer no-frills bank accounts. The resulting accounts offered some perks – such as no minimum balance and no charges – but they failed to attract many new customers, possibly because the local banks, which had little to gain from the service, put little effort into promoting it.

In September 2010, the government also suggested a scheme to issue financial identity numbers. It hoped that the tool would allow banks to track the financial performance and credit histories of people currently denied banking services because they could not show records of their financial histories.

The government planned to issue the numbers at the start of this year, but as the year draws to a close, the program is still not running.