Habib Metro lays out Rs700 million investment in non-banking financial services

Habib Metropolitan Bank Ltd (HMB) is not buying a shiny new business. It is doing something far more prosaic – and, in Pakistan’s financial system, quietly revealing. In a board meeting held on February 12, 2026, the bank approved a Rs700 million capital injection into two wholly owned subsidiaries: HabibMetro Exchange Services Ltd (HMES), its currency exchange arm, and Habib Metropolitan Financial Services Ltd (HMFS), its securities brokerage.

The split is telling. Rs500 million goes to HMES, lifting its capital from Rs1.0 billion to Rs1.5 billion. The remaining Rs200 million goes to HMFS, taking its authorised and paid-up capital from Rs300 million to Rs500 million. Both moves remain subject to the usual regulatory clearances.

Read narrowly, this is housekeeping: topping up capital so subsidiaries can operate “smoothly”, as the disclosure language tends to put it. Read more broadly, it is a small window into how banks are trying to keep customers inside their own walled gardens, even as Pakistan’s financial services sector slowly widens beyond plain-vanilla deposits and loans.

That matters because HMB is not a tiny niche player. The bank, incorporated in 1992 and owned by Habib Bank AG Zurich (Switzerland), has grown into a sizeable mid-tier franchise. In its 2025 reporting, the group disclosed total assets of about Rs1.69 trillion and deposits above Rs1.1 trillion, and it reported profit attributable to equity shareholders of roughly Rs22.7 billion.