How is Dubai Bank coping with the stresses and strains in the global banking system?
“Dubai bank is coping well so far. We have been rather conservative. In fact, we started being conservative last year before the financial crisis hit Dubai. “We started looking at liquidity. There were already signs that there was a strain on liquidity. Now my training says that liquidity is the mother of all risks, so if you have a liquidity issue you need to start really worrying. Therefore, we started getting quite conservative over how we treated liquidity. “We activated branches to run around mobilising deposits. We reoriented our corporate bank towards liabilities management rather than just going out and getting more assets. So there was a lot of effort during mid-2008 in basically trying to shore up our liability position, that helped a lot, and also to slow down our asset growth. “So we have been doing relatively well. We have had our challenges but we have been meeting them with a lot of enthusiasm. There is a ‘warrior’ spirit among some of our younger team members who run ar
