Zafar Masud, Chairman, Pakistan Banks Association and President & CEO, The Bank of Punjab

Zafar Masud has led the Bank of Punjab through a transformation that goes beyond balance sheets, embedding green financing and climate-resilient lending into the strategic identity of the country’s second largest public sector bank. As Chairman of the Pakistan Banks Association, he has argued consistently that financial institutions cannot treat climate change as an externality. Agriculture, water resources, and the livelihoods of millions of small borrowers are directly exposed to climate shocks, and a bank that ignores this is not managing risk, it is accumulating it.

His support for Pakistan’s Green Taxonomy Framework, electric vehicle financing initiatives, and interest-free agricultural machinery loans for small farmers all reflect a development finance philosophy that treats climate vulnerability as a structural economic condition rather than an episodic emergency. The question, as he frames it, is not whether Pakistani banks should engage with climate finance. It is how quickly the sector can build the instruments to do so at scale.