These are exciting times for Mashreq, a leading bank in the UAE and one of the most successful in the Middle East. It has launched a new corporate identity that builds on its history of innovation and customer service and illustrates to the wider world just how committed it is to its customers, to the continued building up of its comprehensive expertise and market knowledge, and to nurturing its top-class reputation in the industry.
The bank’s new identity is illustrated by its new logo, but the logo is only a small part of the story. What really matters is the new direction of the bank’s brand and above all that the brand is always focused on the relationship with the customer.
Mashreq is not a bank that devises products and services to meet its own needs. Instead, the needs that direct the bank’s plans and initiatives are those furnished to it by its customers. The bank’s approach to customer service is founded upon its pursuit of excellence, which is the cultural and commercial catalyst for everything that the bank does.
Mashreq is not a bank that devises products and services to meet its own needs
Overall, the main competitive advantages that Mashreq has established in the highly competitive UAE banking industry are: financial strength, a wide breadth of products, services and solutions, strong customer relationships, and a strong brand customers can identify with.
Quality and quantity
As well as offering personal-banking services, including a considerable diversity of accounts designed to meet all the likely customer requirements that are presented to the bank, Mashreq has established a significant reputation in the area of corporate and investment banking.
For example, on the lending front, Mashreq offers trade finance, project finance, corporate finance, contracting finance and lending for businesses. The bank also offers a wide range of cash management services for businesses, a comprehensive suite of business banking products and services. The bank, in addition, provides all necessary treasury and capital market products including a margin desk, foreign exchange services, equities services and domestic trading facilities in equities.
The corporate banking service provided by Mashreq is, like all areas of its business, founded on the bank’s understanding of the needs and demands of its business clients.
The bank is fully aware that every corporation or firm that makes use of its services has different requirements and that in order to provide the best products and services to individual business organisations, the bank seeks to know as much as it can glean from the organisation about the its requirements, in order to make sure that what the bank offers is fully appropriate to those requirements.
Mashreq’s banking expertise is tried and tested. The bank has been customising banking and financial services to millions of individual customers and corporate customers ever since its foundation back in 1967. Now, not far from half a century later, the bank is one of the leading financial institutions in the UAE and has an increasing retail presence both in the UAE itself and also in other parts of the Middle East including Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait and Qatar. Both in the UAE and beyond, Mashreq focuses on providing its individual customers and corporate customers access to the innovative products and services they need to carry out with maximum efficiency their own financial objectives.
In surveys, Mashreq is always among the highest performing banks in the region. For example, in 2004 it was awarded the EMEA Finance Best Cash Management Services in the Middle East at Sibos. Mashreq was also awarded the Best Corporate Account Product Award for the Middle East by The Banker Middle East. These awards show the quality of the bank’s customer service and the excellence of its products.
Going further
Such is Mashreq’s penetration within the UAE that one in every two households bank with it. The bank also has customer service centres in all key retail locations in the UAE and runs one of the largest ATM networks in the country. There are also a dozen Mashreq overseas offices in nine locations across Europe, the US, Asia and Africa.
Of course, other banks have won awards and other banks have established infrastructures and networks. Mashreq, however, believes that it goes further than its competitors by bringing a quality of vision, leadership and single-minded commitment and devotion to its goals. Indeed, so vital is the bank’s perception of how it outshines its competitors that its organisational culture is specifically based on fundamental commercial values and upon the highly significant features of vision, mission and goals.
The bank’s vision includes such key factors as an absolute commitment to customers, the banks determination to use state-of-the-art technology to ensure that its customers are getting the best service and also that customers are enjoying maximum security in terms of their assets and their data.
On the mission front, the bank considers that it has an edge, defining its overall strategy as a highly relationship-based bank. It is a bank that delivers a superior service, a bank that is in fact the primary bank of choice for almost all its customers. Mission, though, is about internal qualities as well as qualities of products and service and best attention to customers’ needs.
As far as an overall end goal is concerned, Mashreq endeavours to be the best in its field at everything it does. This is not a goal that can be entertained lightly or that can permit any room for complacency or resting on one’s laurels. The bank is working towards achieving such an ambitious goal by pursuing a culture of maximum quality in customer service offerings and one of continuous improvement.
Track record
Mashreq has also managed to achieve an enviable track record when it comes to innovation in the financial sector. One of the most effective tests of a bank’s devotion to service and to overall quality is how rapidly and effectively it implements the very latest technology. The banking and financial sectors have traditionally been one of the first sectors of commerce to deploy new technology. Why? Ultimately the reason is always the same: because this new technology gives customers a better service. For example, Mashreq was the first UAE bank to offer chip-based credit cards, digital point-of-sale readers and an investment fund directly linked to the Indian stock market. As always, this particular innovation was triggered by the bank knowing that some customers wanted this facility and so the bank introduced it for the customers.
On the brokerage front, Mashreq Securities is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mashreq and offers full brokerage services for all UAE equities. The brokerage service at the bank is based on industry best practice and as anybody would expect from any organisation that is part of Mashreq Bank, the standards of service, execution and, where necessary, advice, are among the very best in the UAE banking industry.
Mashreq also owns Mashreq Capital, a wholly owned subsidiary that has a licence to operate from the Dubai International Financial Centre offering the widest range of investment and brokerage services. Mashreq Bank also has wholly owned subsidiary, Makasab, which offers mutual funds and associated services for sophisticated investors. The subsidiary Mashreq Al Islami is the Islamic banking division of Mashreq, and offers a broad range of corporate and retail products that comply with sharia law.
Overall, the aim of Mashreq’s Corporate Banking Group is to spearhead the very highest quality of relationship banking based around a fully customer-centric approach to offering banking services. Mashreq Bank sets out to win the privileged status of being the primary bank of corporate clients, and the bank will spare no efforts to achieve this fundamental goal. The Corporate Banking Group delivers world-class investment banking services to its customers particularly in areas customers find so crucial such as corporate finance, real estate and investment services, including both Islamic and conventional types of service.
The strength and expertise of the banks corporate finance division is shown by its winning the Best Loan House in the UAE Award from EMEA Finance for two years in a row and reaching the number two ranking for Middle East 2013 Book Runner Loan League Table.
Through its comprehensive range of activities in the UAE and beyond, the awards it has won, and in the confidence it has gained from its customers in the UAE and around the world, Mashreq has shown itself to be a bank that people like doing business with and like having as their primary bank.
Mashreq will never rest on its laurels; will always be seeking to meet fresh challenges and to find new ways of giving individual and corporate customers a great service.
