Emirates NBD is looking to expand its presence in Saudi Arabia, its CEO Shayne Nelson has confirmed.
The lender, which became the first UAE bank to obtain a license to operate in Saudi Arabia in 2004, currently has only one branch in the Kingdom.
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Emirates NBD, which has plans to become a regional bank, will focus on growing in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as part of diversification plans, Nelson told Gulf Business in an exclusive interview.
"There’s a lot of quite interesting countries within the MENA, and one place we would like to get much bigger in is Saudi Arabia. That’s an obvious one for us – since it is biggest economy in the region. We have a large branch there, with 250 people, and we are the only UAE bank that has a fully-fledged branch in Saudi Arabia," he said.
"It offers a full range of services including private banking, retail banking and corporate banking, but having one branch in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not really much," the publication quoted him as saying.
Nelson said the Saudi market is not particularly challenging for UAE companies.
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By GlobalData"I think if you talk to local UAE companies that have expanded in Saudi, they have done pretty well. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have strong cultural, economic and political ties. We see it as a good market that we would like to grow into," he said.
