Bangladesh

Dutch-Bangla Bank, founded in 1996 by a group of Bangladesh based entrepreneurs, working in cohort with the Netherlands based Development Finance Company, has always taken its responsibilities in the field of corporate social responsibility seriously.

Wealth management is still a young business in Bangladesh. If you are local and wealthy, your assets are often managed elsewhere, by private bankers in the likes of London, Dubai, or Singapore. But some lenders are seeking to make an impact, rolling out quality wealth-management services to high net-worth and mass-affluent clients.

Standard Chartered stands head and shoulders above its foreign peers in Bangladesh. HSBC has a solid local operation and a few other pan-Asian lenders are here in spirit, but no one can compete with the London-based, emerging market-focused lender.

Brac Bank’s offering is not just devoted to small and medium-sized enterprises. There are good retail and corporate banking divisions at work here, too. But finding thriving Bangladeshi corporates and extending finance to them is what Brac Bank has been doing better than any of its domestic peers since it was founded 16 years ago.

There are plenty of candidates for this award – The City Bank and Eastern Bank both have strong digital offerings and are installing upgrades to keep themselves ahead of the pack – but Standard Chartered is a cut above the rest in the digital world.

Eastern Bank, led by Ali Reza Iftekhar, remains one of Bangladesh’s best-run lenders. Its balance sheet is strong – it boasts one of the country’s lowest ratios of non-performing loans, at 2.69% as of the end of 2016. And its credit rating is solid, with Moody’s confirming the bank’s Ba3 rating with a stable outlook in February 2017, for a second straight year.

Bangladesh has a lot of banks, 57 in total. Many are small and troubled, but Dhaka also hosts the headquarters of a handful of first-rate banks that invest in themselves, their customers and the country around them.

A management shake-up and a renewed focus on financing small and medium-sized enterprises have boosted Brac Bank’s performance. But CEO Selim Hussain says he is nowhere near finished when it comes to unleashing the bank’s potential.