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Mandiri Manajemen Investasi, the fund management unit of Bank Mandiri, says it is continuing its push to expand the amount of overseas funds in the $2.2 billion that it manages.

The latest move by the Jakarta-based unit in this direction is a cooperation with Australia’s AFM Investment Partners.

“We aim to have about 20 percent of our assets under management contributed by foreign investors in the next five years,” Wendy Isnandar, director of MMI, said on Thursday.

Foreign investment currently accounts for about 2 percent of the Rp 20.2 trillion ($2.2 billion) assets under MMI’s management, he said.

MMI has been collaborating with financial companies in Singapore and Honk Kong since December last year, Wendy said, and is looking to work with more companies in other countries. He did not name the companies in Singapore and Hong Kong involved in the cooperation.

Wendy said MMI had started a new partnership with the Australian firm to tap into that country’s institutional investors.

He said Melbourne-based AFM Investment Partners, an independent financial services company, would provide information to major institutional investors in Australia on MMI.

John Donovan, managing director at AFM Investment Partners, said Australia held the fourth-largest core capital in the world with about 1.8 trillion Australian dollars in total. He said given Australia’s shallow equity market, some of these funds should be invested abroad.

“Australia’s equity market is only about 2 to 3 percent of global market capitalization. More and more Australian money needs to be invested offshore,” Donovan said in a teleconference from Melbourne.

Most of this capital, called “superannuation,” comes from the Australian workers, he said.

The Australian government requires workers to set aside 9 percent of their annual income for a pension fund. According to Donovan, the government is working on raising that portion to 12 percent.

If the proposal is approved, there would be even more money to be invested, he said.

MMI’s Wendy said they were looking to have 20 percent of their funds under management come from overseas, and thought that about 5 percent of that total could come from Australia.

With current global economic conditions, Wendy said funds were moving into Asia, especially China and India. But he said he felt Indonesia could offer more growth potential than those two.

“China and India are big, but the trend is slowing. This is the time to enter the Indonesian market,” he said.

Indonesia’s benchmark stock index has gained 0.6 percent so far this year. India’s Sensex has lost 15 percent, Shanghai’s index has dropped 10.7 percent and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong has declined 16.5 percent.

Both the MMI’s Wendy and AFM’s Donovan said they had received a positive response from investors in the past three months about their cooperation.