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Auctions for central bank debt, also known as SBI, will be held monthly instead of weekly from June, with Bank Indonesia preferring to issue three- and six-month debt rather than the more popular one-month maturity debt.

Bank Indonesia said on Friday that the policy was meant to push lenders to manage liquidity over a longer span and support more active transactions in the interbank money market.

One-month SBI has been the favorite of investors. At the auction on Thursday, Bank Indonesia sold Rp 33.4 trillion ($3.6 billion) of the securities, while 10.9 trillion of debt with a three-month maturity was sold and Rp 1.7 trillion of the six-month paper.

“The policy to extend SBI maturity is expected to add to financial deepening and enhance the effectiveness of our monetary policy,” said Darmin Nasution, acting governor of the central bank.

He said depositing excess funds in one-month SBI discouraged lenders from being more involved in the money market, which leads to transaction volume being far smaller than the liquidity in the banking system.

However, Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, chief economist at the Danareksa Research Institute, warned that the policy might not work as expected. He said that efforts to make monetary policy more effective will be useless if banks still look to put significant amounts of their cash into SBI.

“Changing the time of the auction or the tenure will be useless. If banks have extra liquidity, they have to seek better investments by lending to maintain their profitability,” Purbaya said. “If all of the banks are offering credit, there is going to be an interest rate war that will drag lending rates down.”

There will be a three-month transition period before the policy becomes fully effective.