Features

Can Indonesia’s likeable president find a way to boost growth, slash red tape, tackle the country’s image problem and draw in much-needed FDI now that he has secured a second five-year term?

Is Timo a café or a bank? VinaCapital’s Don Lam reckons his popular Vietnamese neobank can profitably be both – and more. Vietnam’s emergent cashed-up millennials seem to agree.

BNP Paribas’ Asia wealth management division was once a digital laggard, but thanks to its ‘design factory’ in Singapore, led by Vivien Jong, it is now a global leader, inventing ways to make the bank work better and more profitably.

Its exchange was once buzzing with new listings – these days, the only IPOs that keep equity capital market bankers busy come from Reits. What can the city-state do to convince its best young firms to choose home over Hong Kong or New York?

Malaysia’s sixth-biggest bank was once eager to serve the country’s now disgraced former prime minister Najib Razak and his fugitive associate Jho Low. And then it all went wrong, as court cases in Kuala Lumpur reveal.

Plans to merge TMB Bank with Thanachart Bank have raised hopes of further consolidation, but it will take a lot more than that to shake up the sector and create champion banks to compete with regional leaders.

Pakorn Peetathawatchai, president of the Stock Exchange of Thailand, is determined to harness digital platforms and launch new products to create a model exchange for the region.

Bank of the Philippine Islands is already one of the top corporate and investment banks in the archipelago; now CEO Cezar Consing wants the bank to focus on financial inclusion by expanding its microfinance, SME and consumer lending businesses.

Asiamoney has spent the past two months interviewing the chief executives of the biggest, most important and most disruptive financial institutions in the region. These firms have already made history – next, they will make the future.