MtGox knowingly traded non-existent bitcoins for two weeks, filing shows

Did MtGox knowingly trade non-existent bitcoin? Photograph: EDGAR SU/REUTERS

MtGox continued trading for at least two weeks despite knowing that it did not hold enough bitcoins to return every customer their money, according to a deposition from the CEO of the embattled bitcoin exchange.

Mark Karpeles, MtGox’s chief executive, gave the deposition to the Northern District of Texas bankruptcy court on Monday 9 March. In it, he explains: “On February 7, 2014, all bitcoin withdrawals were halted by MtGox due to the theft or disappearance of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins owned by MtGox customers as well as MtGox itself.”

It was known before Karpeles’ deposition that MtGox had blamed bitcoin losses due to hacking for the closure of bitcoin withdrawals. But the document shows that it was another two weeks before MtGox halted trading on the exchange itself, when it closed the site without warning on February 25.

In that period, MtGox continued to accept trades and earn commission on them. Users couldn’t cash out their bitcoins, but they could still sell them on the site and attempt to withdraw their money. As a result, the price of bitcoins on the site plummeted over the fortnight, potentially lessening Gox’s liabilities while earning the failing company commission fees.

Jeremy Kirk, of trade publication Computerworld, estimates that those commissions were worth almost $1m over the 19 days the company was trading while knowingly lacking a complete reserve.

While MtGox has pointed to hacking as the reason for its massive loss of bitcoin, the company is quiet as to the reason for a corresponding difference of $27m between stated customer deposits of cash and the amount it was holding.

The latest news of MtGox’s troubles comes against the disappearance of yet another bitcoin exchange. Bitcurex, a polish bitcoin exchange, was apparently hacked on Friday morning. Both the Zloty and Euroexchanges are now offline, and users report seeing the prices of bitcoin shoot up shortly beforehand, suggesting that the site’s coins were removed.

Microsoft's $2.5bn question: what if it doesn't release Office for the iPad?

Growing numbers of people and businesses are choosing to buy tablets such as the iPad - which poses a problem for Microsoft Office. Photograph: Anthony Upton/REX

It may be one of Microsoft’s biggest squandered opportunities.

Tired of waiting for Office to be optimised for their mobile gadgets, a growing contingent of younger companies is turning to cheaper, simpler and touch-friendly apps that can perform word processing and other tasks in the “cloud” - on internet-based systems.

Take Artivest Holdings, a New York-based financial services startup that sells alternative investment products. The New York-based company uses an app called Quip, which combines word processing and messaging, to handle all but the most sensitive legal and financial files.

“There are no more Microsoft Word documents being circulated. If someone emails me a Word document, I’ll tell them to put it in Quip,” said Artivest’s chief investment officer David Levine. 

“If I’m walking to and from home, or going to an appointment, I can review or edit on my iPad. Not being tied to my desk, that’s a big pro,” he said. 

The speed with which apps like Quip have been adopted is forcing Microsoft to intensify its efforts to bring the powerful but ageing Office software suite to tablets and smartphones, according to people close to the company.

Microsoft already has a full iPhone and iPad version of Office ready for release, the sources said. The only question is when chief executive Satya Nadella, who took over in February, will pull the trigger. 

More customers, more money

Nadella wants to widen Office’s customer base but has to balance that with the flagship Windows franchise, which benefits greatly from tight integration with Office, especially on desktop computers. 

“We have some pretty exciting plans,” John Case, the top Office marketing executive, told Reuters without giving any details. “Certainly, interest in Office on the iPad is extreme. When they (customers) want to do real work, they are going to want to use Office.” 

Investors for years have urged Microsoft to adapt Office, its most profitable product, for mobile devices from Apple and Google - rather than shackling it to Windows as PC sales decline. 

Activist investment firm ValueAct Capital, whose president Mason Morfit sits on Microsoft’s board, has more recently voiced misgivings about Office’s continued mobile absence, sources familiar with the firm said. 

Office still generates huge revenues for Microsoft. In the year to September 2013 the Office division generated $25bn of revenues and made $16.4bn of profit.

However according to one analyst estimate, Microsoft is giving up $2.5bn a year in revenue by keeping Office off the iPad, which has now sold almost 200m units. 

“Office is being disenfranchised on the hottest growth platforms,” Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund wrote in a note to clients. “Maybe it is time to focus on Office independent of Windows.”

Some analysts say it may be too late for Microsoft to win back the iPad generation, even if it introduces a mobile-optimized Office suite in the next few months, as expected. 

“Look at the applications that are on the rise to support mobile. It is not Microsoft OneNote or Word. It’s [file transfer app] Dropbox, or [note taking service] Evernote,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst at tech research firm Forrester. “It’s really about being everywhere. That’s an important, immediate decision that Satya’s going to have to drive.” 

New apps on the block

Microsoft’s productivity tools remain the industry standard, with more than a billion users. But Office revenues are driven primarily by corporate officers who buy for large workforces - and more than half of America’s employees use a mobile device daily to supplement their work.

The rapid rise of apps such as Quip, presentation software Haiku Deckand Prezi, sketch system Paper, project management systemSmartsheet, Good and Evernote, not to mention Google Apps, is nibbling away at the Office franchise. That is particularly true among mid-sized and smaller companies, which tend to be more frugal and less dependent on legacy Office documents or spreadsheets. 

Ian Ray, a network administrator at Cypress Grove Chevre Inc, a cheese maker based in Arcata, California, has most of his 35-member workforce using web-friendly apps on iPads and Google Chromebooks. 

“We use Google for email, Google Docs tied to that, Expensify for expense reports, Lucidchart for doing flow charts, and Smartsheet for organizing projects,” Ray said. 

After more than two decades, Microsoft has in recent years eased some Office functions into the mobile arena, mostly accessibly via web browser. The company has yet to release a touchscreen-optimized version of the full Office suite including Word, PowerPoint and Excel - not even for its own Windows 8 operating system, released in October 2012.

One reason for the delay appears to be internal politics. The powerful Windows group and the younger but more profitable Office group have a patchy history of collaboration. 

When then-Windows boss Steven Sinofsky unveiled the touch-friendly Windows 8 and the Surface tablet in late 2012, many industry insiders remarked on the absence of a tailor-made Office suite, which was shepherded by Kurt DelBene at the time. 
Both Sinofsky and DelBene left their jobs within months. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has vowed to override divisions with his ‘One Microsoft’ overhaul launched last summer, now in Nadella’s hands. 

But divisions remain. Some in the Windows camp want to make sure Office remains primarily a Windows experience, which should help sales of the Surface. Others in the Office camp, however, want to reach customers on as many platforms as possible. 
“We will bring these apps to Windows devices and also other devices like the iPad in ways that meet our customers’ needs and in ways that make sense economically for Microsoft,” the company said in a recent statement. 

Staff devices and the ticking clock

According to research firm Ovum, 57% of all employees use a personal smartphone or tablet to access corporate data, while 70% of tablet owners use their personal tablets at work at some point.

Companies are increasingly allowing employees to work on their personal devices - a trend the IT industry has dubbed “bring your own device” or BYOD. 

That is the true danger for Microsoft, said Adam Tratt, a former Office executive who is now chief executive of Seattle-based Haiku Deck, an iPad-based presentation app. 

“Microsoft rose to dominance in an age when the CIO (chief information officer) really held the keys to IT decision making,” said Tratt. “Over the past five years, BYOD has really eroded the level of control that many CIOs have.” 

Although they are not as fully fleshed out as Office, younger challengers have been built from the ground up in an era defined by mobile devices and cloud computing. 
Text files in Quip, for instance, are not formatted in virtual 8.5x11in pieces of paper - instead, they automatically zoom to fit any tablet screen. Revisions in a file can be made and viewed, in real time, by collaborators without sending email attachments back and forth. 

“We don’t have Word’s 30 years of features built into it,” said Bret Taylor, Quip’s co-founder. “But we’re much better at collaboration and much better at mobile

Britain's five richest families worth more than poorest 20%

Oxfam has urged George Osborne to use Wednesday’s budget to make a fresh assault on tax avoidance. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

The scale of Britain's growing inequality is revealed today by a report from a leading charity showing that the country's five richest families now own more wealth than the poorest 20% of the population.

Oxfam urged the chancellor George Osborne to use Wednesday'sbudget to make a fresh assault on tax avoidance and introduce a living wage in a report highlighting how a handful of the super-rich, headed by the Duke of Westminster, have more money and financial assets than 12.6 million Britons put together.

The development charity, which has opened UK programmes to tackle poverty, said the government should explore the possibility of a wealth tax after revealing how income gains and the benefits of rising asset prices had disproportionately helped those at the top.

Although Labour is seeking to make living standards central to the political debate in the run-up to next year's general election, Osborne is determined not to abandon the deficit-reduction strategy that has been in place since 2010. But he is likely to announce a fresh crackdown on tax avoidance and measures aimed at overseas owners of high-valueLondon property in order to pay for modest tax cuts for working families.

The early stages of the UK's most severe post-war recession saw a fall in inequality as the least well-off were shielded by tax credits and benefits. But the trend has been reversed in recent years as a result of falling real wages, the rising cost of food and fuel, and by the exclusion of most poor families from home and share ownership.

In a report, a Tale of Two Britains, Oxfam said the poorest 20% in the UK had wealth totalling £28.1bn – an average of £2,230 each. The latest rich list from Forbes magazine showed that the five top UK entries – the family of the Duke of Westminster, David and Simon Reuben, the Hinduja brothers, the Cadogan family, and Sports Direct retail boss Mike Ashley – between them had property, savings and other assets worth £28.2bn.

The most affluent family in Britain, headed by Major General Gerald Grosvenor, owns 77 hectares (190 acres) of prime real estate in Belgravia, London, and has been a beneficiary of the foreign money flooding in to the capital's soaring property market in recent years. Oxfam said Grosvenor and his family had more wealth (£7.9bn) than the poorest 10% of the UK population (£7.8bn).

Oxfam's director of campaigns and policy, Ben Phillips, said: "Britain is becoming a deeply divided nation, with a wealthy elite who are seeing their incomes spiral up, while millions of families are struggling to make ends meet.

"It's deeply worrying that these extreme levels of wealth inequality exist in Britain today, where just a handful of people have more money than millions struggling to survive on the breadline."

The UK study follows an Oxfam report earlier this year which found that the wealth of 85 global billionaires is equivalent to that of half the world's population – or 3.5 billion people. The pope and Barack Obama have made tackling inequality a top priority for 2014, while the International Monetary Fund has warned that the growing divide between the haves and have-nots is leading to slower global growth.

Oxfam said the wealth gap in the UK was becoming more entrenched as a result of the ability of the better off to capture the lion's share of the proceeds of growth. Since the mid-1990s, the incomes of the top 0.1% have grown by £461 a week or £24,000 a year. By contrast, the bottom 90% have seen a real terms increase of only £2.82 a week or £147 a year.

The charity said the trends in income had been made even more adverse by increases in the cost of living over the past decade. "Since 2003 the majority of the British public (95%) have seen a 12% real terms drop in their disposable income after housing costs, while the richest 5% of the population have seen their disposable income increase."

Osborne will this week announce details of the government's new cap on the welfare budget and has indicated that he wants up to £12bn a year cut from the benefits bill in order to limit the impact of future rounds of austerity on Whitehall departments.

Oxfam said that for the first time more working households were in poverty than non-working ones, and predicted that the number of children living below the poverty line could increase by 800,000 by 2020. It said cuts to social security and public services were meshing with falling real incomes and a rising cost of living to create a "deeply damaging situation" in which millions were struggling to get by.

The charity said that starting with this week's budget, the government should balance its books by raising revenues from those that could afford it – "by clamping down on companies and individuals who avoid paying their fair share of tax and starting to explore greater taxation of extreme wealth".

The IMF recently released research showing that the ever-greater concentration of wealth and income hindered growth and said redistribution would not just reduce inequality but would be economically beneficial.

"On average, across countries and over time, the things that governments have typically done to redistribute do not seem to have led to bad growth outcomes, unless they were extreme", the IMF said in a research paper. "And the resulting narrowing of inequality helped support faster and more durable growth, apart from ethical, political or broader social considerations."

Phillips said: "Increasing inequality is a sign of economic failure rather than success. It's far from inevitable – a result of political choices that can be reversed. It's time for our leaders to stand up and be counted on this issue."

Landed gentry to self-made millionaires

Duke of Westminster (Wealth: £7.9bn)

Gerald Grosvenor and his family owe the bulk of their wealth to owning 77 hectares (190 acres) of Mayfair and Belgravia, adjacent to Buckingham Palace and prime London real estate.

As the value of land rockets in the capital so too does the personal wealth of Grosvenor, formally the sixth Duke of Westminster and one of seven god parents to the new royal baby, Prince George.

The family also own 39,000 hectares in Scotland and 13,000 hectares in Spain, while their privately owned Grosvenor Estate property group has $20bn (£12bn) worth of assets under management including the Liverpool One shopping mall, according to leading US business magazine Forbes.

Reuben brothers (£6.9bn)

Simon and David Reuben made their early money out of metals. Born in India but brought up in London, they started in local scrap metal but branched out into trading tin and aluminium.

Their biggest break was to move into Russia just after the break-up of the Soviet Union, buying up half the country's aluminium production facilities and befriending Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch associate of Nat Rothschild and Peter Mandelson.

The Reuben brothers are still involved in mining and metals but control a widely diversified business empire that includes property, 850 British pubs, and luxury yacht-maker Kristal Waters. They are also donors to the Conservative party.

Hinduja brothers (£6bn)

Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja co-chair the Hinduja Group, a multinational conglomerate with a presence in 37 countries and businesses ranging from trucks and lubricants to banking and healthcare.

They began their careers working in their father's textile and trading businesses in Mumbai and Tehran, Iran but soon branched out by buying truck maker, Ashok Leyland from British Leyland and Gulf Oil from Chevron in the 1980s, while establishing banks in Switzerland and India in the 1990s.

The family's London home is a mansion on Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St James Park and just along fromclose to Buckingham Palace, which is potentially worth £300m. They have links with the Labour party.

Cadogan family (£4bn)

The wealth of the Cadogans family is built on 90 acres36 hectares of property and land in Chelsea and Knightsbridge, west London.

Eton-educated Charles is the eighth Earl of Cadogan and ran the family business, Cadogan Estates, until 2012 when he handed it over to his son Edward, Viscount Chelsea.

Charles, who is a first cousin to the Aga Khan, started in the Coldstream Guards before going into the City.

He was briefly chairman of Chelsea Football Club in the early 1980s and his family motto is: "He who envies is the lesser man."

Mike Ashley (£3.3bn)

Ashley owns Newcastle United football club and became a billionaire through his Sports Direct discount clothing chain which he started after leaving school.

He was the sole owner of the fast growing business, which snapped up brands such as Dunlop, Slazenger, Karrimor and Lonsdale, until it floated on the stock market in 2007. He now owns 62%.

Ashley is a regular visitor to London's swankiest casinos but is famously publicity-averse.

Age of behaviour-changing innovation

Mobile technologies are bringing about an era of ubiquitous connectivity. Users are now able to access information anywhere any time with ease. CREATIVE COMMONS

LAHORE: Since the industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, humankind has experienced a series of ‘disruptive innovations’ which have upset the status quo and created new markets and value chains.

Such a disruption is inevitably accompanied by behaviour change of the consumer as in the case of how we have moved from buying albums from CD stores towards downloading individual songs from iTunes. In the retail banking industry, we believe that similar disruption of conventional branch banking accounts is afoot with mobile wallets poised to completely change the way consumers make payments.

The introduction of simplicity, convenience, accessibility and affordability are the hallmarks of disruptive innovations; they do not necessarily have to be advanced technologies. The secret lies in disrupting the behaviour of people – getting them excited enough about something to change how they behave.

Amazon, Netflix and Apple are classic examples having disrupted entire value chains and completely changed the behaviour of customers. In a world where businesses always struggle to anticipate and keep up with changing customer behaviour, driving behaviour is a game changer – any company that can successfully accomplish this will take a commanding position in its respective industry and it will take quite a while for competitors to catch up.

Information age

The onset of the information age has led to an exponential rise in the frequency of disruptive innovations; each decade in the last half century has seen an innovation that has driven drastic increases in business productivity.

The graph depicts how lifecycles of technology have driven innovation and productivity. From the mainframe era (approximately 100,000 computers worldwide) through the PC era (approximately 100 million computers worldwide), we are currently in the age of the SMAC Stack (computers approaching approximately 100 billion). The term SMAC refers to the ‘stacking’ of four technologies:

Social technologies allow for the rapid sharing and creation of knowledge over social networks; this enhances collaboration and information distribution across a business.

Mobile technologies are bringing about an era of ubiquitous connectivity. Users are now able to access information anywhere any time with ease.

Analytics allow companies to deconstruct new forms of data in the cloud and generates unprecedented insight scalable to enable smart boardroom decision-making in real time.

Cloud technology lends businesses a newfound agility, breaking down the barriers of geography and cutting the costs associated with physical server maintenance. With limitless scalability, the cloud powers the transformative combination of social, mobile and analytic technologies.

The term ‘SMAC Stack’ was originally coined by US firm Cognizant Technology. This concept is also referred to as ‘Nexus of forces’ or ‘Third Platform’, but SMAC sounds much better to us!

In the age of SMAC Stack, the transfer of value chains from the physical to the digital plane makes it easier to influence customer behaviour which is why most of the commonly cited examples take place within the past 10-15 years. For example, the power of Facebook lies in the fact that it engages millions of users several times a day and is in a position to change behaviour by introducing new features and experiences.

Digital wallets

The conventional bank account in its current form is decades old and the cheque book has had its day. Why fill out loads of paperwork and then wait an entire week for your bank account to open?

We believe that just like anyone can now purchase a movie or a music album online while sitting at home and begin consuming the product right away, a customer should be able to make a phone call, get a wallet activated within hours and start using it right away with the accompanying plastic being delivered to his/her home the next day. This is the kind of disruption the digital wallets are promising.

Nowadays as companies venture into other industries in search of grown, non-banking companies such as Google and Starbucks are trying to disrupt the payments space with their own digital wallets. Unless banks take the bold step of disrupting themselves they will be reduced to a feeder channel performing a warehousing function; others will take centre stage and the resultant ownership of customers.

This sounds straightforward to outsiders, but is actually not so easy given that banks are conservative organisations and very protective of their existing revenue lines. When someone says ‘innovation’, a lot of people in the management hear ‘cannibalisation’. It is important to realise that this ‘cannibalisation’ is actually a preemptive strategy against ‘erosion of market share’.

Should banks choose to go this route, they will find they hold a big advantage in that they have thousands of staff and millions of customers with whom they are already interacting digitally through several channels. The global benchmark for an ‘active’ customer is that he/she comes into contact with the bank between three and six times a month.

If through the digital wallet we can manage to change this to 10-20 times a day for several 100,000 customers, we believe we can bring about a disruptive transformation in the banking industry. We believe this will introduce a new level of convenience for our customers and result in a large amount of savings in terms of time and money. Once our customers recognise these benefits, we will automatically witness the behaviour change that is our Holy Grail!

Court urged to hear Musharraf’s case in Dubai

ISLAMABAD

Former president Pervez Musharraf’s lawyer filed a petition in the special court on Sunday to conduct hearing of the case in Dubai owing to life threats to Musharraf.
A petition was filed by Syed Abbas Naqvi over the shifting of the treason case hearing to Dubai. According to details, in the request a stance was adopted that Musharraf faced death threats in Pakistan. Due to the worsening law and order situation of the country it was not possible to continue the case in Pakistan.
It is important to transfer the hearing to an unbiased place, the United Arab Emirate for dispensation of justice, the petition read, adding that like the cricket matches which are held in unbiased places this way Musharraf’s case should also be heard in impartial place.

Chinese firm to execute power projects in KP

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government will issue a 30-year operational license to a Chinese company for executing power projects in the province.

The survey team of the company would start its work from Shoghore, Chitral soon after receiving no objection certificate (NOC), said a handout. It added that after collecting statistics of the flow of water in all four seasons of the year in the area the company would start construction of the power house from next year.

In this connection a meeting was held on Sunday that was attended by Adviser to Chief Minister Rafaqatullah Babar and representatives of Chinese hydel power company Zhongnan Engineering Corporation and mineral company Tuny-Pak Minerals. Expressing interest in investment in hydel power and mineral sectors of the province, the Chinese companies requested for issuance of NOC.

Mr Babar appreciated the offer and said that it was a welcoming gesture that the interest of investment in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by neighbouring friendly country Peoples’ Republic of China was increasing.

He said that Chinese companies had made investment of billions of dollars in different sectors in the province. He assured Zhongnan Engineering Corporation of issuance of NOC for establishment of hydel power station in Shoghore area of Chitral and said that company could start work from next week.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Mr Babar said, was rich in natural resources and had huge potential in hydel power and mineral sectors. “The issuance of licences has been started to different national and international companies for exploiting these potentials,” he added.

The representatives of the company told Mr Babar that their survey team would start work soon after receiving NOC for Shoghore Chitral. After collecting statistics of the flow of water in all four seasons of the year in the area, they company would start construction of power house from next year, they added.

The electricity produced from the power station, which will be completed in one and half year, will be provided to local industrial units at subsidised rates.

Mr Babar said that under one-window operation of the provincial government, the Investment Promotion Cell would provide all necessary facilities with immediate effect to all domestic and foreign companies.

He said that for future power projects, the company would be issued a 30-year operational licence and the tariff would be fixed according to the policy evolved by the provincial government.

Pakistani banks in UK

There are already about 100 overseas branches (including representative offices in the form of what is known as the overseas boots and units) of Pakistani banks. PHOTO: FILE

LONDON: Pakistani bankers have earned a stellar reputation in the international market, through working for multilateral institutions (like World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Islamic Development Bank), investment banks (eg JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Natixis) and Islamic banks (eg Al Rajhi Bank, Kuwait Finance House and Standard Chartered Saadiq Bank) all over the world.

Many high-profile investment and international bankers have also acquired positions of national significance. Moeen Qureshi and Shaukat Aziz were two bankers who served as prime ministers of Pakistan. The outgoing governor of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), Yaseen Anwar, was also an investment banker who worked for Bank of America Merrill Lynch before joining the SBP.

Banking has been a respectable profession in the Indian sub-continent and a number of Muslim families were instrumental in building multinational banks like Habib Bank and Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Although the reputation of the latter, following the failure of its international business from London, has been besmirched, it is undeniable that during its existence BCCI was a truly international brand under the leadership of Agha Hasan Abidi.

Another international brand is in the making under the leadership of Prince Karim Aga Khan whose Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) acquired 51% shareholding in Habib Bank Limited (HBL) after the government of Pakistan decided to privatise it in 2003.

Following the acquisition, HBL emerged as the largest private bank in Pakistan, with an international branch network in 17 countries. Just before the privatisation, HBL was nearly shut down in the UK by the then financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA). It was then restructured under Habib-Allied International Bank, which was a result of merger between six UK branches of HBL and four UK branches of Allied Bank Limited (ABL).

In the UK, HBL is fast emerging as a high street bank focusing on the South Asian Diaspora. Last year, it acquired Habibson Bank and Habib Bank AG Zurich’s UK branches to develop one consolidated business under Habib Bank UK Limited. Today, it has seven branches in the country.

It faces competition from another British bank with shareholders connected to Pakistan. United National Bank was formed with the merger of UK branches of United Bank Limited and National Bank of Pakistan. It has recently been re-branded as United Bank UK Limited or UBL UK.

HBL, along with other Habib brands like Habib Bank AG Zurich, Habib Metropolitan Bank and Bank Al Habib, has the potential to become a globally recognised and respected brand in banking and finance.

If the shareholders, led by AKDN and the government of Pakistan, devise a strategy to develop it as a pan-Islamic financial institution with a strong presence in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) bloc, it can lead to increasing trade amongst member countries and consequently economic integration in due course.

HBL can also be developed as an international bank focusing on the needs of the Pakistani Diaspora. This is a role that UBL is playing in a number of Middle Eastern countries, especially the six countries that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council.

If somehow, the authorities encourage a merger between UBL and HBL, the combined banking group can emerge as a powerful international bank, with branches in a number of countries where the Pakistani Diaspora is significant in number and proportion.

There are already about 100 overseas branches (including representative offices in the form of what is known as the overseas boots and units) of Pakistani banks. HBL tops the list, followed by UBL and NBP.

There is certainly a need to devise a comprehensive policy for the overseas expansion of Pakistani banks. With growing popularity of Islamic banking, it may be worthwhile for larger Pakistani Islamic banks to expand their operations into territories.