Pakistan

In a country where the wealthy have always preferred to have their cash offshore – in Dubai, Singapore or London – Standard Chartered pioneered domestic wealth management in an effort to keep it at home. And that’s been a good strategy for a London-based bank that, by dint of its colonial heritage, operates with a local mandate in Pakistan, allowing local access with perceived international solidity.

In Pakistan, when it comes to international banks, there is Standard Chartered – and then there’s daylight. Shazad Dada’s outfit has been in the country since 1863, and has recently seen off StanChart’s traditional competitors in the south Asia region, notably HSBC and Citibank (the latter the alma mater of so many Pakistani bankers).

In a faltering economy, HBL’s corporate and investment banking business managed to stand tall in 2018.

After a miserable year in 2017, Pakistan’s biggest bank bounced back in 2018 to become, well, bigger still.

Pakistan is a bailout addict, having spent 22 of the last 30 years in the fund’s intensive care, but can Imran Khan’s new government break that dependency? His finance minister says he has the cure.

The new chief executive of Pakistan’s biggest bank has wasted no time in overhauling it after it was kicked out of the US and fined $225 million in 2017.

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The 29th annual Asiamoney Brokers Poll invited chief investment officers, fund managers and investment analysts to take part. Voters represented fund management houses, insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds and wealth managers from around the world. A total of 6,540 valid individual responses from 3,100 different institutions, including 411 hedge funds, were received.

It is perhaps no surprise that in a supposedly democratic nation that has been ruled by generals for 33 of its 71 years of independence, the military has an outsized role in Pakistan’s economy.