Mamun Rashid

The banking industry as a business is inherently risky.

Thanks to The Daily Star and DHL Worldwide for holding Bangladesh Business Awards for 22 consecutive years. Having been with its jury panel for nine years during the initial period, I know how tough it is to find the awardees, especially the individual businesspersons with respectable track records.

Fallen dictator Sheikh Hasina used to regularly lament that she did a great job, but our civil society members were behaving dumb. A few of my friends were quite aggrieved -- our country made so many achievements, yet the Western media and opinion makers were not recognising any of those.

Classified loans in the banking sector have exceeded Tk 211,000 crore. Various agencies are talking of almost Tk 400,000 crores of stressed assets in the banking sector, almost 25 percent of the total loans.

To ensure that contributions from individuals like Nusrat, Prapti, and Dipty are not isolated, we must take concrete steps to empower the next generation of women

In order to narrow or meet the investment gap and more so, to abide by employment generation obligations, every country needs foreign direct investment (FDI).

Lately, I have been receiving calls from friends and family asking which banks are safe or if they should withdraw their deposits from a particular bank.

Thanks to our entrepreneurs, a few dynamic policy planners, mostly docile and hard-working workers, Bangladesh’s private sector has expanded rapidly and became a crucial driver of economic growth.

Until mid-2010 I was not aware that the immediate past prime minister had a special assistant for stolen asset recovery.

A new governor has joined the central bank of Bangladesh. As a leading macroeconomist, he has rightly identified inflation and the lack of discipline in the banking sector as the main culprits to be addressed. Both issues are very important, there’s no doubt about it.

We have been talking about banking sector reforms since long as our banking sector is plagued with insider lending, bad loans, low capitalisation and risk coverage, weak governance, sub-optimal automation, a lack of expert manpower and non-availability of better products to serve the emerging clients and cater their shifting demands.

Bangladesh witnessed a threefold rise in human outflow over the past decade. Yet, remittance inflow has experienced relatively poor growth, rising from $15 billion to a maximum of $24 billion.

Decision makers need to be very cautious regarding who they put up to dispassionately clear the mess.

My friend who is an apparel exporter received a call from his Spanish buyer over the weekend.

Backed by experience and good judgement, Gen Z ideas are worthwhile investments.

Free trade agreements (FTA) are made between countries to lower trade barriers through little to zero government tariffs or subsidies and other means.

China is the largest exporting and second-largest importing country in the world. The Chinese domestic market is also expanding fast with increasing consumerism and brand popularity. Yet Bangladesh’s export to China is dropping despite signing the tariff waiver for many “Made in Bangladesh” products.

When I visited Colombo last April, the airport was humming with a lot of tourists. My experience at the immigration was very good while foreign exchange booths were showing a much more stable exchange rate. Afterwards my interactions with a few entrepreneurs revealed a revival of industrial production and exports too.

It was possibly 2008 when my seniors at Citigroup India realised it was becoming hard for global companies to attract IIM (Indian Institute of Management) or IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) graduates as they were building their own startups.

The semiconductor manufacturing sector is well-known for its complexity, high stakes and intense corporate competition. Demand has always been driven by innovation, with every new technology changing the game.