Ferheen Mahomed: Challenges continue for banks, but talking can help

Ferheen, one reason that your team won CLP's award was your innovative work on establishing yourself as a wholly-owned subsidiary bank – this involved business localisation and conversion of assets and liabilities of existing branches into a new subsidiary bank. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

It has been a very extensive, very difficult process ... [T]here's a tremendous uncertainty in the law as to what works and what doesn't work; market practice varies from institution to institution and also varies across different provinces in China; and as a result of that, the way we have had to work on the documentation has been adopting a two prong approach. One is constant discussion with the regulators, to understand exactly where the areas of risk are; and two, in adopting a very risk-based approach in our advice to management and our business clients, because there aren't really any hard or fast rules in being able to do certain things. There is the law, but the area around the law remains quite grey … until they develop sufficient jurisprudence on the interpretation of the law.