The ever-shrinking footprint of Standard Chartered Bank

In some ways, it is as though the last two decades never happened.

It has been almost exactly 20 years since Standard Chartered Bank Pakistan became the first major foreign bank to acquire a local bank, an acquisition that transformed the bank in the eyes of Pakistani consumers from being a niche foreign bank serving only high net-worth individuals and corporate clients to a more approachably aspirational brand.

Since 2008, however, the bank’s local and global management have been consistently treating that acquisition as a mistake, and have managed to successfully reverse it completely.

For the past five years, Standard Chartered Bank has had fewer physical branches in Pakistan than it did before the 2006 acquisition of Union Bank, currently sitting on just 37 branches as opposed to the 43 it had at the end of 2005. And its share of the banking industry’s deposits is now just 1.7%, which is far lower than the 3.1% of deposits it had before the acquisition and far lower than the 5.2% share it had immediately after acquiring Union Bank.

In other words, Standard Chartered Bank matters less to the Pakistani banking industry – and by extension, its economy – than it did 20 years ago. And the Pakistan business matters less to Standard Chartered’s global revenues than it has at any point in the past 20 years (barring the unusual year in 2013).

Put all of these data points together, and one might be forgiven for feeling that one is about to read yet another story of a multinational corporation watching its Pakistan business slowly withering away before eventually pulling out.