Bangladesh

Kamal Quadir has transformed financial services for the poor in Bangladesh with bKash. The mobile payments system is shaping up to be a great success story. Here’s how a child of independence put it together.

Citygem is the private banking operation of The City Bank, run by chief executive Sohail R K Hussain. But nationalism compels Bangladesh’s central bank not to allow private banking as much of the world knows it, so in Bangladesh it’s called priority banking.

As befits a bank that springs from a charity, corporate and social responsibility is part of Brac Bank’s DNA. And in a year where Bangladesh endured the world’s gravest humanitarian crisis, Brac Bank stepped up to help, directly raising funds to assist the millions of Rohingya refugees escaping persecution in neighbouring Myanmar, and by plugging domestic aid gaps for a government diverted by the Rohingya crisis.

As Bangladesh’s vast battalions of small and medium-sized businesses carry their country up the development scale from poverty to middle income, François de Maricourt and his team at HSBC Bangladesh have positioned to helping them on that journey.

Like Google, Skype and Hoover, the ubiquity and ease of the bKash mobile payments system across Bangladesh is such that the platform has become a verb.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That might be the mantra at Standard Chartered Bangladesh under new chief executive Naser Ezaz Bijoy, in his first year in the chair at Bangladesh’s pre-eminent foreign bank.

Chief executive Ali Reza Iftekhar has made Eastern Bank the go-to destination for Bangladeshi corporates and foreign multilaterals addressing the country’s chronic infrastructure shortage.

Brac Bank’s straight-talking chief executive, the Standard Chartered veteran Selim Hussain, hit the ground running when he arrived in November 2015.