Op-Ed By Imran Malik | Editor-in-Chief, MediaBites.com.pk
STOP THE PRESS: Some sources claim that the three in the picture were short listed, and might ZM would be the next NBP President.
Pakistan’s most powerful banking chair is empty. Nine candidates sat before a Finance Minister-chaired panel last week. The Federal Cabinet will make its decision this week. And PKR 10.8 crore in annual salary, stewardship of PKR 7.1 trillion in assets, and the responsibility of sustaining a record PKR 85.9 billion profit await whoever gets the call.
Everyone is asking who has the best banking credentials. I want to ask a different question.
What does it actually take to become the President of the National Bank of Pakistan?
After watching Pakistan’s public sector banking appointments for two decades, my honest answer is this: three qualities win this job. And the most important one has nothing to do with banking.
Quality One — The Banking Track Record
Let us start with what should matter most and genuinely does matter, at least partially.
Has the candidate taken a struggling institution and delivered transformational results? Has he or she built a lending book, restructured an organisation, expanded a branch network, managed a crisis, and emerged with numbers that speak for themselves?
NBP just posted PKR 85.9 billion in net profit, its highest-ever annual result. Pre-tax profit reached PKR 178.9 billion, up an extraordinary 216 percent from the year before. Total income hit PKR 311.7 billion.
Whoever sits in that chair next inherits a bank performing at the peak of its history. The pressure to sustain, let alone surpass, those numbers is enormous. A candidate without a credible banking track record simply cannot be trusted with that responsibility regardless of any other qualification they bring.
Banking excellence is the floor. It is not the ceiling.
Quality Two — Political Chemistry With the Right People
Here is the part that Pakistan’s banking industry discusses privately and almost never publicly.
In a state-owned institution whose president is formally appointed by the Federal Cabinet, the single most determinative factor in the selection process is whether the Prime Minister and Finance Minister are personally comfortable with the candidate.
Not impressed. Not professionally satisfied. Personally comfortable.
Does the candidate’s name generate trust in the right rooms? Does the Finance Minister feel at ease picking up the phone? Has the candidate been visible at the right events, in the right conversations, with the right level of institutional grace that Pakistan’s power corridors respond to?
Technical excellence gets a candidate to the interview panel. Political comfort gets them the chair.
This is not corruption. I want to be precise about that. It is institutional reality. The Prime Minister and Finance Minister are accountable for NBP’s performance. They need a president they trust personally, not just professionally. In any country’s governance system, that human dimension of executive appointments is real. In Pakistan’s system, it is decisive.
The candidate who understands this and navigates it with integrity, building trust through genuine competence rather than empty flattery, has a structural advantage that no banking qualification alone can replicate.
Quality Three — The Cultural Transformation — The One Nobody Is Talking About
This is the quality I want to spend the most time on because it is the most important and the least discussed.
Walk into any NBP branch in Pakistan. Not the head office. Not the flagship urban branch. A standard neighbourhood branch in any Pakistani city.
What do you see?
Staff leaning back in chairs with the quiet confidence of people who know their jobs are permanent. Customers standing at counters waiting for attention that arrives on the employee’s timeline rather than the customer’s need. A service culture that treats the person standing on the other side of the counter as an inconvenience to be processed rather than a client to be served.
This is not a criticism of individuals. It is a systemic consequence of decades of government employment protection. When an NBP employee knows with absolute certainty that no matter how poorly they perform, no matter how many customers they alienate, no matter how many complaints are filed, their job is essentially permanent under the government umbrella — the customer loses every time.
Compare this to Pakistan’s private banking sector. Walk into any HBL, MCB, UBL, or Meezan Bank branch. The difference in service culture is immediate and striking. The private bank employee knows that poor performance has consequences. They know that customer satisfaction is measured. They know that their continued employment is connected, at least partially, to how well they do their job.
NBP’s next president must close that gap. Not through mass terminations or theatrical restructuring announcements that generate headlines and deliver nothing. Through the slower, harder, more consequential work of building an accountability culture at every level of a 15,000-person organisation spread across 1,503 branches from Karachi to Gilgit.
That means performance metrics that actually matter. Customer satisfaction scores that feed into appraisal systems. Branch managers who understand that their job security is connected to their branch’s service quality, not just to their relationship with a regional head. And a leadership tone from the top that makes clear, consistently and credibly, that NBP is a bank, not a government welfare programme for its own employees.
The candidate who can credibly articulate how they will achieve that cultural transformation, and who has a track record that suggests they can actually execute it, would be doing something more valuable than sustaining any profit record. They would be building an institution capable of earning the trust of the 220 million Pakistanis it is supposed to serve.
The Two Questions the Federal Cabinet Is Actually Asking
So what are the two most important qualities for Pakistan’s next NBP president?
Officially, banking excellence and leadership vision.
In practice, banking credibility strong enough to be publicly defensible, and political chemistry warm enough to be privately comfortable.
The cultural transformation question, the most important question of all, is the one nobody in the room is asking loudly enough.
That is the question I am asking today. Not because I know which of the nine candidates has the answer. But because the next time a Pakistani citizen stands at an NBP counter and is treated as an inconvenience rather than a client, they deserve to know that someone, somewhere, asked it before the appointment was made.
Pakistan’s banking community already knows which question the Federal Cabinet is really asking.
The rest of us are watching to see which answer arrives.
Imran Malik is Editor-in-Chief of MediaBites.com.pk, Head of Content at Southera.com, and Founder of SharjahNews.ae. He is a member of the Online News Association USA and WAN-IFRA Germany.
The views expressed in this Op-Ed are the author’s own and do not represent the editorial position of any organisation he is affiliated with. All references to candidate qualities are general observations about Pakistan’s public sector appointment culture and do not refer to any specific individual among the nine candidates interviewed.
