(Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. on Thursday kicked off its foreign exchange business in the Philippines, looking to tap foreign investors, outsourcing companies and chip manufacturers in one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies.
“We want to service our global clients, our MNCs, and to be able to do that we want to expand their services,” Vince Valdepenas, the bank’s Philippine country head, said in an interview on Thursday, referring to multinational companies.
The US lender, one of the first foreign banks to set up shop in the Southeast Asian nation, is also working on opening a fixed-income business in Manila, he said. It initially will cater to multinational firms and large local conglomerates before covering financial institutions including asset managers and insurers.
The Philippine economy grew 6.3% in the second quarter and could expand further with consumption likely to be supported by the central bank’s pivot to monetary easing from August.
“We are quite excited. The market just for the FX business is like about $300 billion annually and we do think we will be able to get a pretty good market share of that,” Shah Jahan Abu Thahir, the Singapore-based head of the bank’s Southeast Asia Global Markets, said in the same interview.
The size of foreign exchange transactions in the Philippines will likely “grow substantially” over the next few years, Abu Thahir said, citing expanding foreign direct investments in Southeast Asia. “I do feel like it’s going to be a structural, multi-year tailwind and opportunity,” he said.
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