Search results for

Few banks dominate their own market like KBZ in Myanmar, which covers close to half of all banking transactions made in this young market. KBZ is the most advanced of Myanmar’s homegrown banks. Now with Asian banking stalwart Mike de Noma – a veteran Standard Chartered banker and former CTBC chief executive in Taiwan – installed at the helm, founder Aung Ko Win has shown that he wants the bank to vault ahead of the competition as the country embarks on deeper economic reform.

OCBC’s Daniel Tan has carved out an inventive franchise in Myanmar, in spite of the retail and commercial limitations that foreign banks operate under in the country.

Pact Myanmar, the NGO that manages Pact’s development portfolio in the country, is one of the largest non-profits operating in Myanmar and has been active since 1997. With funding from a mix of private and public backers such as USAid, 3MDG, Chevron, Coca Cola and Ooredoo, its development programmes reach three million people.

India has been a tricky market for international banks to gauge in the years since the global financial crisis. Some have quit the market entirely while others have drastically streamlined their product range.

Wealth management in India is intensely competitive – and for good reason. The number of high net-worth families is set to double by 2025, to 500,000, with a total cumulative net worth of $5 trillion. At least half of that additional wealth will be created by first-generation entrepreneurs, led by the country’s digital barons. Meanwhile, India is reckoned to have between 40 and 45 family offices, with average assets under management of $318 million. All those facts and figures are provided directly by Edelweiss Financial Services, the winner of this year’s award for India’s best provider of private wealth management.

A good way to identify the best digital provider in any market is to ask the market. When Asiamoney sat down in early 2019 with the chief executives of India’s banks and asked them to identify the best provider of digital banking services, the answer came back crisp and clear: HDFC.

Founded in 2004, Yes Bank embraced new thinking from the outset. It saw early on that it would benefit by honing its marketing message and making its brand and branches look consistent and attractive. But it is in serving the country’s army of small and medium-sized enterprises that it really stands out.

Last year was a tough one for Bangladesh’s banks. Political instability took a toll in an otherwise strong economy, and many lenders experienced a dip in profits and an increase in bad loans. But one lender sailed serenely through the storm in 2018, staying above the fray.

This is always a tough award to judge, in large part because being a dab hand in the capital markets does not automatically make a bank a great corporate lender.

What makes Kotak Mahindra Bank so good? Is it that it never seems to have a bad year? That its long-term strategic decisions tend to be good ones – in stark contrast to some of its peers?

The Commercial Bank of Ceylon might still have an old-fashioned name, but 2016 has seen ComBank make a big leap into Sri Lanka’s banking future. A revamped website saw its online customer base grow by 34% over the year to claim the title of the country’s most-used online banking site.