As a frontier emerging market, Cambodia is not an immediate draw for overseas investors. National Bank of Canada (NBC) chief executive Louis Vachon says that when it invested in Cambodia’s Advanced Bank Asia (ABA), it was a hard sell to shareholders. “Were my shareholders sceptical initially? Yes,” he says.
NBC’s Cambodia investment is just one example of several pioneering deals done by overseas banks in the retail markets of Thailand and the CLMV region comprising Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. More usually when Western and Japanese banks invest in emerging markets they focus on their compatriot companies there, then branch out to cover larger domestic companies.
