Standard Chartered Plc (STAN), the U.K. bank that depends on Asia for most of its profit, and Barclays Plc (BARC) are expanding in Saudi Arabia as oil above $100 a barrel and record bond sales bolster earnings in the biggest Arab economy.
“We’d be crazy to limit ourselves to a handful of bankers when we can see oil prices are going to sustain the Saudi economy for the foreseeable future,” Rory Gilbert, the head of Middle East and North Africa at London-based Barclays’s wealth management unit, said in an interview this week in Dubai. “In four or five years, we’ll have a much broader presence in Saudi Arabia.”
Barclays is expanding operations to target more millionaires, according to Gilbert. Standard Chartered, also based in London, started a capital markets office in Saudi Arabia, Viswanathan Shankar, the bank’s chief executive officer for the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas, said in an interview at a Bloomberg conference in Doha, Qatar yesterday.
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