Bank Indonesia (BI) is the central bank of the Republic of Indonesia. It replaced in 1953 the Bank of Java, which had been created in 1828 to serve the financial needs of the Dutch East Indies.

The Bank of Java was a note-issuing bank in the Dutch East Indies, founded in 1828, and nationalized in 1951 by the government of Indonesia to become the newly independent country’s central bank, later renamed Bank Indonesia. For more than a century, the Bank of Java was the central institution of the Dutch East Indies’ financial system, alongside the “big three” commercial banks. It was both a note-issuing bank and a commercial bank.