Awards for Excellence 2020
|
|
Since joining Habib Bank in early 2018 as president and chief executive, former JPMorgan banker Muhammad Aurangzeb has transformed the Pakistan-based lender from the ground up.
This wasn’t a simple task. The bank’s home country spends most of its time dancing on the lip of an economic volcano. Last year, facing another balance of payments crisis, the government entered its 22nd IMF bailout programme.
Yet Habib Bank sails serenely on, a model of health compared with the sovereign’s straitened circumstances. Under Aurangzeb it has become the go-to lender for Chinese state firms and banks deeply invested in the infrastructure projects along the length of the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
You can tell when Beijing trusts a foreign financial institution. In December 2019 China’s banking regulator, the CBIRC, handed Habib’s Beijing branch a full operating licence.
|
Muhammad |
It is the only Pakistani bank with an onshore renminbi settlement capability; and Chinese state-owned enterprises keen to buy assets in the likes of the Maldives, Bangladesh and the Middle East often tap it for funding and advice.
“China is going to be the lynchpin of our regional bank strategy,” says Aurangzeb.
But Habib Bank’s transformation efforts run far deeper. At home, its main digital platforms, HBL Konnect and HBL Mobile, have brought 3.7 million previously unbanked citizens into the financial fold, 60% of whom are women, the bank reckons.
Another 3.2 million people have come on board from other banks to benefit from Ehsaas Kafalat, an Rs144 billion ($860 million) government programme launched in April 2020 by prime minister Imran Khan.
Ehsaas works by disbursing small monthly sums of cash to 12 million needy families hit economically and financially by coronavirus.
Aurangzeb describes Ehsaas as a “remarkable public-private partnership”, through which the bank has so far disbursed $750 million to more than 10 million Pakistan households via HBL Konnect.
Habib Bank’s investment in digital not only enables customers to access welfare payments at 40,000-plus electronic touch points and retail stores but also (courtesy of its cybersecurity division) helps regulators in Islamabad pinpoint welfare cheats.
The bank is clearly unwilling and unlikely to stand still. In 2019 it launched HBL Infinity, the country’s first online trading platform, providing corporate customers with real-time FX pricing and execution. In total, the bank processed 340 million digital transactions in 2019, a 35% increase over the previous year.
Habib Bank is the only Pakistan bank that lets its customers submit a credit card or loan application wholly digitally. Last year it tied the knot with Visa, launching a QR-based mobile payments service that lets consumers make instant payments on the go.
