Standard Chartered is expanding its reach and depth of business in Latin America. “This is our chance to take a larger piece of the global pie,” says Mohamed Grimeh, the bank’s head of trading and deputy head of global markets, Americas.
Grimeh joined the emerging markets specialist bank in January from Lehman Brothers. “I was pleased that Standard Chartered was interested in hiring me because it is the ultimate emerging markets platform,” he says. “The bank is in better shape than its competitors. In the last few months the bank has been growing and going through a transformation in terms of the products it offers to it clients.”
In the past few years, Standard Chartered’s core clients in Asia and the Middle East have developed new relationships with corporates in Latin America. “Latin American corporates are generally large exporters of commodities so the link with Asian corporates, big commodity consumers, is natural. Our aim is to service this two-way trade flow,” says Grimeh. “Most of those global corporates are clients that we service so we are in a good position to leverage these growing trade flows.”
He adds: “But we want to go beyond just trade routes – we want to service US clients by selling them Asia, Middle East and African products.