Pakistan

Credit Suisse’s willingness to take Pakistan far more seriously than many of its global peers has paid off handsomely in the past year.

Arif Habib’s hopes for the stock market in Pakistan were dashed this year. Granted, its analysts were not alone in predicting that after a bruising 2021, the KSE-100 Index would bounce back in 2022. But AHL’s prediction that the market would make history, topping 55,000 points, grabbed headlines.

Arif Habib

In its 15 years of existence, JS Bank has come to be known for many things. It is one of Pakistan’s fastest-growing financial institutions, a leader in the digital banking space and a generator of insurance products. But the bank’s most important influence may be how its strong commitment to diversity and financial inclusion is prodding peers to follow its lead.

Timing is everything when it comes to investing. So United Bank’s decision to bet big on building digital platforms in the two years before the pandemic hit was apposite.

Bank of Punjab is a commercial banking power that has acquired a solid reputation for serving clients and making markets in Pakistan, particularly in recent years after Zafar Masud took over as chief executive in early 2020.

HBL is Pakistan’s first commercial bank, having been set up in 1941, before moving its operations to the country in 1947 at the request of newly independent Pakistan’s first leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. It is now the nation’s largest private-sector bank, and winner of Asiamoney’s award for the best domestic bank in Pakistan this year.

MCB Bank, one of Pakistan’s oldest financial names, has travelled a rather circuitous path to become a corporate banking mainstay. It was founded in 1947 as a private-sector institution, then nationalized in 1974 and privatized in 1991. Shoaib Mumtaz, who was appointed chief executive at the end of 2021, has been with the bank since he joined a year after its privatization.

Since 1863, Standard Chartered has consistently brought the world to Pakistan’s lively economy. As fate would have it, the bank’s 150th year as a financial bridge to the south Asian market is proving to be among the toughest.