Keeping only the cream

Bangladesh welcomes foreign investors with summits and enough PowerPoint slides to illuminate Dhaka. When one retreats, the ceremony is quieter. It becomes a “strategic realignment,” the regulator calls it a business decision, and everyone hopes the logo remains long enough for the next investment brochure.

Standard Chartered Bank is reportedly preparing to sell its Bangladesh retail and cards business. Nothing is final, but it has reportedly briefed Bangladesh Bank and approached buyers. Its retail and CMSME portfolio stood at Tk 8,479 crore. HSBC is already winding down retail banking. If SCB withdraws, Bangladesh may lose its last global banking window for individuals, leaving foreign-bank logos mainly for corporations, trade flows and profits. Is that evidence of economic strength?

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For the group, logic is: keep profitable corporate, trade and institutional banking, reduce people and improve profit per employee. SCB plans to cut more than 7,000 roles globally by 2030. Several hundred may face diminished roles or redundancy. Excel calls it efficiency. Families may disagree.

Standard Chartered’s possible retail exit could leave Bangladesh without a global banking window for individuals, while the bank retains corporate, trade and institutional business and profit

Yet corporate and retail banking are not separate islands. Corporate relationships create salary accounts, cards and employee loans; supplier networks create SME customers; retail deposits provide funding. Much of SCB’s retail franchise grew from the corporate business it intends to retain. A bank cannot welcome companies while showing employees the exit.

In the 1960s, my working mother banked at Grindlays Bank’s Hadi Mansion branch and Sonali Bank’s New Market branch. As a child, I dreamt of Grindlays. Every salary in my corporate life has passed through Grindlays or SCB.

Mine is a family’s story. The institution’s relationship with this land reaches to 1905. It witnessed Partition, the Language Movement, Liberation and Bangladesh’s rise. After independence, it extended the first credit lines to the nation and opened its first external letter of credit in 1972. Later, Bangladesh introduced its first ATM, debit card and credit card.

Through coups, floods and crises, its doors remained open, training professionals and raising standards in service and risk management. Institutions spend decades asking people to trust their name; people expect the name to remember them.

SCB earned a record Tk 3,300 crore profit here in 2024. A foreign bank should not harvest Bangladesh’s corporate business while abandoning consumers, employees and the legacy that helped create its profitability.

SCB is not leaving Bangladesh. It may be leaving Bangladeshis while keeping the corporations, trade flows and profits it wants. Retaining the cream while selling the customer is modern romance.

SCB, HSBC and Citi operate as foreign-bank branches, not locally incorporated banks. They benefit from parent balance sheets and global networks, while decisions remain overseas. They meet local requirements but lack subsidiaries’ ring-fenced capital and local board accountability.

Malaysia requires foreign commercial banks to incorporate locally while allowing full foreign ownership. Britain may require subsidiarisation when foreign-branch retail deposits become material. What is prudent in SCB’s home country cannot be radical here.

Bangladesh Bank and Invest Bangladesh should persuade SCB to retain retail banking until the economy and banking sector stabilise and not rush to approve a sale. Invest Bangladesh must engage SCB’s leadership and develop a retention package. Investor aftercare means more than welcoming capital with flowers; it means stopping investors from packing.

If SCB insists, approval must protect employees, customers, data and service continuity. Foreign banks with material retail deposits should eventually operate through incorporated subsidiaries. Sometimes the answer is: “Not now; Bangladesh’s interests come first.” Free trade cannot mean keeping the cream and leaving Bangladesh the empty bowl.

The writer is the founder of BuildCon Consultancies Ltd and BuildNation Ltd.