Gone is the decade that saw the overseas Pakistani professionals return to their homeland - at least in the financial industry. Now, the shortage of top bankers is badly felt - it could be the dearth of competent experienced human resource or the lack of financial muscle to attract top managers or a combination of both.
Whatever it is, a couple of bankers nourished by the Citibank nursery have gained maturity at Manshas MCB which mainly runs on the owner-run-model - eyeing long term value. These bankers are now switching top positions at banks like the Pakistan cricket team once used to change captains.
In todays age of modernity, when there is a change in trend of moving from experience to exuberance to cater the needs of fast moving global village in the internet age, Pakistans financial industry and public sector entities are skewed towards the retiring age professionals by giving them fresh assignments.
The other anomaly apparent is older bankers coming out of retirement with the recall of M.A. Usmani at MCB and Khalid Sherwani at ABL. In fact, a few months back, this column ran an article "Old is gold", commenting on the flurry of Ijaz Butt-style leaders.
Now, lately there has been some news that Aftab Manzoor will take over as Soneri Banks President replacing Atif Bajwa who replaced him as President of MCB some time back.
Interesting, Bajwa took over Manzoor at MCB during the boom time owing to formers experience in consumer segment. While the latter was inducted by Manshas close associate Ibrahim Groups bank (Allied Bank). However, Manzoor could not regain the second term at ABL nor could Bajwa at MCB.
Now within a year of his service at KASB, Manzoor is reportedly joining Soneri. And, Bajwa with less than six months at Soneri is moving to a vacant group-head position at Abu Dhabi Group after the unsavoury divorce with the brothers (Bashir Tahir and Pervez Shahid). The ADG is the sponsor of Bank Alfalah along with a seat in UBL and ownership of two telecom companies - Warid and Wateen.
The increasing turnover of CEOs at banks and other financial services in Pakistan is in line with the global trend. However, average turnover, according to a study, is still 7 years in Western banks - whereas, domestic bankers are changing jobs at a far higher pace.
The trend, which is unique to Pakistan, is that bankers from large family-owned banks are moving to small to medium sized banks.
The plausible reason is that the boards of family-owned banks believe in running the institutions themselves rather than by a foreign-trained expensive management. Mian Mansha has successfully proved this model with the success of the MCB. It has been replicated by Naeem Mukhtar at the ABL.
On the other hand, there is a dearth of profitability model in the small banks. The boards hire experienced bankers but they tend to fail in creating a profitable niche to help sustain small banks.
The apex regulator, SBP, is required in tandem with the government to enhance the documentation in SMEs segment and agriculture and allied industries in order to facilitate small banks to become specialised banks and move away from traditional corporate-based lending model that can only be run by raising low cost deposits for which a bank, at a minimum, requires 350-400 braches.
The other, and more viable, option is to merge with large and medium sized banks. However, there is no rationale for large banks to acquire small ailing units, leaving smaller entities to merge among themselves i.e. the Summit model.