Pakistan

“As close as lips and teeth”

As a woman running one of Pakistan’s leading banks, Sima Kamil has already made her mark. But her goal is for UBL to snatch top place, elbowing aside HBL, her former employer.

Allied Bank (ABL) is a quiet achiever in Pakistan’s bank corporate social responsibility efforts. It focuses on distant, low-profile and often-dangerous parts of the country, notably the backward and overlooked region of Balochistan in Pakistan’s remote west.

It’s not just Pakistan’s biggest companies that turn to HBL for help. Over the last year, the bank has benefited from a sharper focus on small and medium-sized enterprises, and in doing so has extended its dominance as Pakistan’s largest SME lender.

It has been a busy year for Telenor Bank, the former Tameer Bank, which has pioneered mobile phone-enabled micro-payments in Pakistan on the Easypaisa platform.

In an admittedly limited field of foreign banks in Pakistan, Shazad Dada’s Standard Chartered Pakistan continues to have few peers. Assets crossed PRs500 billion ($4.5 billion) during the year as pre-tax profits fell 12% to PRs13.5 billion, from PRs15.3 billion. Dada blames this on tighter margins and re-pricing within his investment portfolio, in a “challenging” market.

Already the largest commercial bank in Pakistan, HBL’s main focus in 2017 was to power up its corporate lending business in the domestic market as it fought fires from regulators overseas.

After years of chasing HBL and United Bank, MCB may be on the verge of becoming Pakistan’s banking leader. In June, MCB formally began its absorption of Pakistan’s 11th biggest bank, NIB Bank, and is reaping the benefits: total deposits jumped 24% to cross PRs1 trillion ($9 billion) for the year, while assets climbed 23% to PRs1.37 trillion.