South Asia
South Asia
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The Singapore lender is looking to India in search of new business and growth opportunities, its chief executive Piyush Gupta tells Euromoney. Long term, it aims to emulate onshore the country’s best private-sector lenders, HDFC and Kotak Mahindra.
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Global money is flooding into India to profit from high-performing stocks, a booming economy, and the ease of investing via Gift City, a growing financial hub in Gujarat. Local wealth is flowing the other way, notably to Dubai. It’s a gold mine for private banks, and the process has only just begun.
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While no charges have been laid against the Adani Group, a new Sebi rulebook addresses a key concern that came from the January stock-market controversy.
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KVS Manian has been overlooked in favour of ex-Barclays man Ashok Vaswani. What does it mean for one of India’s finest banks?
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A handwritten note brings down the curtain on a 38-year journey for bank founder.
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The Japanese bank is now well placed to take advantage of growing confidence in the country.
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As relative newcomers to India’s financial markets, small finance banks have made considerable progress in attracting customers with little or no credit history. Ittira Davis, managing director and chief executive of Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, tells Asiamoney about initiatives to reach the country’s vast underbanked population.
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The government’s ambitious plan for full digitalization could reduce crime and increase tax revenue. It could also lead to greater innovation in the banking sector.
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Pakistan has been trying to improve financial inclusion for the last 20 years with little success. Are new digital licences the answer?
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Sri Lanka has just navigated a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis. Sanath Manatunge, chief executive of Commercial Bank of Ceylon, and Jonathan Alles, CEO of HNB, talk to Asiamoney about what challenges remain for the country’s embattled banking sector.
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Corporate governance challenges and a lack of domestic demand have constrained ESG issuance in India so far. The blowout dual-tranche domestic rupee sovereign green bond in January could be set to change that.
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Nandalal Weerasinghe has returned from exile to rescue the country’s battered economy. Will he succeed?
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A two-week period saw Adani Group attacked by a short seller, abandon a $2.5 billion share offer and lose $100 billion in market value. What next? And what does it mean for Modi’s India?
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Afghanistan’s economy is in a mess. After the Taliban took back control of the country in August 2021, the US froze the central bank’s foreign reserves. Can an unassuming Afghan-American economist secure the release of these funds so that the economy can recover?
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Imran Khan’s government was toppled in April, but it didn’t take long for its replacement to make a new deal with the IMF, just as many have done before. How can Pakistan break its IMF addiction?
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Faced with a political and economic crisis, Sri Lanka’s top bank chief executives took matters into their own hands to prevent a collapse of the country’s financial system.
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The nation has navigated the Covid-19 pandemic better than many of its peers, but its luck won’t last unless it brings in some big, meaningful reforms.
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The firm’s wealth management arm positioned itself early for a possible spurt in unicorns in India and the opportunities that may bring. It is now reaping the rewards.
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Fintech firm bKash has revolutionized Bangladesh’s payments industry in the 11 years since it was founded. But its CEO still has more tricks up his sleeve.
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India is chipping away at the many obstacles on its way to achieving carbon neutrality by 2070. The path is uphill, but will its efforts pay off?
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India is embracing crypto-currencies and has even floated the idea of a digital rupee. These are natural steps for a country whose digital infrastructure is rapidly evolving, but with the future of the policy environment still unclear, details matter.
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Zafar Masud survived a plane crash a month after he took over as Bank of Punjab’s chief executive. The experience pushed him to double down on his beliefs – and take this regional Pakistani bank to the next level.
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As the economy lands with a thud, there’s a dearth of talent in Colombo’s official ranks. Pragmatic diplomacy might now be a better option for the embattled Rajapaksa clan.
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The profligate island’s economy is in meltdown, but authorities appear clueless about how to fix it. The government has consulted the IMF, but a bailout is by no means assured.
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Meezan has rapidly become one of Pakistan’s leading banks, thanks to a couple of early acquisitions.
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The future of banks in Afghanistan is uncertain after the Taliban toppled the government in August.
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A much-needed and long-overdue shake-up is starting to pay off, but National Bank of Pakistan’s chief executive is still fighting hard against the old ways of doing business.
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The new entrants are slowly gaining ground and finding ways to bring change to the financial industry. But their path to growth is handicapped by regulatory roadblocks.
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India’s plan to set up a bad bank is set to be a game-changer for state lenders pressured by rising non-performing loans. But can the country’s authorities pull it off?
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Commercial Bank of Sri Lanka, the island’s biggest non-government bank, has had a relatively good crisis thanks to strong discipline and leadership.
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Jeevan Gnanam, scion of a grand Sri Lankan business family, is driving financial sector modernization and helping to revitalise a once-thriving part of the capital.
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The Bangladeshi investment bank seems closer to a supranational lender in terms of aspirations.
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During the pandemic, Bangladesh’s Eastern Bank proved that it was in safe hands. The company’s chief executive is now turning his attention back to growth.
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When Soumya Rajan left Standard Chartered to form Waterfield Advisors in 2011, her aim was to create India’s best elite-level wealth management firm. Nearly ten years and $4 billion in AUM later, she may well have done just that.
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Banks in Bangladesh were struggling with poor performance even before coronavirus spread to the country; the pandemic is worsening the impact of a recent policy misstep.
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The spectacular collapse of a fast-growing private lender in early March has dealt yet another blow to India’s already shaky finance industry, led to the arrest of its founder and thrown a spotlight on the bank’s aggressive lending practices.
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The financial industry has been a mess, hit by defaults, rising bad loans, corporate governance scandals, frauds and, most recently, the government rescue of Yes Bank - the worst may be over, but things aren’t tidy yet.
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The country’s banks have worked hard to develop their digital capabilities, but customers are slow to join the revolution.
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The chief executives of People’s Bank and Bank of Ceylon have both been ousted as part of the government’s new hard line on state-owned banks it considers are not doing enough to help the struggling economy.
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The payments company has attracted a who’s who of investors – but as competition rises, its founder is now pushing for more, not less, regulatory oversight.
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The country is now in the grip of another bailout programme and Reza Baqir, the new central bank governor, sees parallels for the nation from his last job at the fund.
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Seizing opportunities and doing the tough things well has made Kotak Mahindra Bank a leading actor in shaping Asia's financial institutions.
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SBI is reshaping India's financial system, continuing to act as the bedrock of local banking life while delivering a profit to shareholders.
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The past decade has not been a happy time for a financial institution once instinctively viewed by many as India’s best-managed private bank; and as for the future… those involved have to keep their nerve.
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Bangladesh's Grameen Bank pioneered the fields of microfinance and microcredit, earning founder Muhammad Yunus a Nobel Peace Prize and helping shape the Asian financial system.
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Created to promote the social development of women alongside its commercial interests, First Women Bank has led the way in financial inclusion.
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The government has done an about-turn on its plans to introduce higher taxes on foreign portfolio investors as it finds ways to boost the equities market. Experts reckon the finance ministry misjudged the state of things.
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Nepal’s government wants everyone to have access to a bank and has ordered a branch in each of the country’s 753 districts. Asiamoney journeys to one of the poorest and most remote parts of Asia, high in the Himalayas, to see if its grand financial-inclusion plan is working.
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Chaos and upheaval in Nepal have given way to growth and stability, and investors have taken note. Capital is flowing in from India and China, while the government pushes ahead with securing its inaugural credit rating, but can the good times last?
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RBL Bank has been transformed over the last decade, from parochial local lender to a second-tier bank with genuine national scale. Its investment in digital and data analytics, and its focus on financial inclusion, suggests it isn’t finished yet.
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Its local banks have invested heavily in technology, but many customers still prefer the old-fashioned ways: paper ledgers and physical tellers. And while the country’s fintech industry is filled with promise, it remains stuck in first gear.
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Private equity was once a peripheral pursuit in the country – no longer. With many of India’s big companies deep in debt, immersed in bankruptcy proceedings or cut off from bank funding – or all of the above – buyout firms are rushing to fill the void.
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The country’s fintech sector has enormous potential, but it is being hobbled by a host of factors, from inconsistent regulations to a damaging credit crunch affecting local non-bank finance companies.
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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.
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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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A new chief executive is busy rolling out a bold strategy to make it the country’s biggest lender, with the help of some of the savviest names in the business – bKash, Grameenphone and China’s Ant Financial Services.
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Sri Lanka’s focus on reforming and liberalizing its economy is bearing fruit, with the country signing new free trade agreements and posting record exports and growth figures. The government is keen to sell down state assets and position the island at the heart of Indian Ocean maritime trade.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Indrajit Coomaraswamy was all but retired when the call came to run Sri Lanka’s central bank. He can’t remember saying yes to the job, but in 18 months, the self-effacing civil servant has given a government on the edge of bankruptcy a new lease of life.
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Just when everyone thought India’s state-owned banks were on the path to recovery, a $2 billion fraud at Punjab National Bank has knocked confidence in the whole sector and cast doubts on the government’s ambitious efforts to sort out these ailing lenders once and for all.