By Hadeel Al Sayegh and Yousef Saba
RIYADH (Reuters) – Banks are in a good position to maintain current strong performance levels even as interest rates come down, Standard Chartered Chief Executive Bill Winters told Reuters on Wednesday.
“I think we’re probably going to approach a sweet spot for banks over the next year or two,” he said on the sidelines of Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative (FII) investment conference in Riyadh.
Lower rates will impact banks’ earnings but will provide some stimulus to the economy and should also keep lenders’ credit costs low, Winters said.
The U.S. Federal Reserve began its long-awaited easing cycle last month after increasing rates at a rapid clip to fight inflation between March 2022 and July 2023.
The interview followed the bank’s third-quarter earnings earlier on Wednesday. It more than doubled pretax profit from a year earlier as it joined European peers in making robust progress on sustaining profits even as rates fall.
Standard Chartered flagged its plans to double investment in wealth management and trim its retail operations. Winters said he sees a “tremendous opportunity for growth” for the wealth management business in the United Arab Emirates, its emerging third hub after big wealth hubs Hong Kong and Singapore.
“The very important third wealth hub is Dubai – or the UAE more broadly, because Abu Dhabi is also building – and it’s small for the time being relative to Hong Kong and Singapore, but I think we see tremendous opportunity for growth there.”
The UAE is expected to see a net inflow of more than 6,700 millionaires in 2024 – more than any country in the world – according to a report this year by Henley & Partners.
NAVIGATING COMPLEXITY
The FII meeting is being held against a backdrop of concerns over regional conflict and less than a week before the U.S. presidential election.
Winters said both candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, “see China as an arch rival” and plan to “step up the level of competition with China”.
That increased competition makes it difficult to get some things done, he said. “It’s more complicated – tariffs to navigate and supply chains to reconfigure and, speaking as respectfully as possible, that actually works well for us because we help our clients to navigate that complexity,” Winters said, adding he hoped there would not be bifurcation between the world’s two biggest economies.
“The RMB (renminbi) is internationalizing, so the Chinese currency is becoming a very important currency of trade,” he said.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that China is considering approving next week the issuance of over 10 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) in extra debt in the next few years to revive its economy.
“What I’m pretty sure (of), from my interactions with Chinese leaders and business, is that they want to take very clear and visible steps that they’re prepared to act to get the economy on to the kind of footing that they think is appropriate, which is at a growth rate that’s certainly not lower than this and probably a bit higher,” Winters said.
($1 = 7.1235 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Hadeel Al Sayegh and Yousef Saba; Editing by David Holmes)
