Qamar Saleem | Contributor | Trade Finance Global

Qamar Saleem is the Regional Manager Advisory Services, Financial Institutions Group for Asia and Pacific, and the Global Lead for SME and Supply Chain Finance Practice at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group. In this role, Qamar heads IFC’s Financial Institutions advisory services business spanning across nearly 40 countries, covering over 200 financial sector clients and providing technical support across 10 thematic areas such as MSME, SCF, Climate, Digital, Housing, Agri, Gender finance. IFC’s MSME Banking and Supply Chain Finance advisory services specifically supports the financial sector globally in building and scaling MSME Banking and SCF businesses at the market, financial intuition and firm levels.

Qamar has over 27 years of experience in diverse commercial banking and business transformation initiatives globally. He is a recognized development finance expert working across Asia driving IFC’s financial intuition clients into playing an active role in promoting inclusion, climate change response, and enabling the digital economy. He is also an MSME Banking and Supply Chain Finance expert and has played leadership roles in expanding the MSME and SCF portfolios of financial institutions across the Middle East; North Africa; Eastern Europe; Africa; Latin America; East, Central and South Asia. He is a featured speaker, thought leader and trainer at numerous MSME and SCF knowledge sharing forums across the world and has steered partnerships with various private and public sector entities in helping augment support mechanisms for increasing financial inclusion of especially the micro, small and medium enterprise segments.

Prior to joining IFC, Qamar was associated with internationally recognized banks like HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank as well as large regional banks operational in several emerging markets. Qamar holds a master’s degree in business administration and carries several certifications in the areas of Strategy, Business Transformation, SME Banking, Corporate Leadership, Supply Chain Finance, Credit, Risk, Trade, Treasury, Sales, Transaction Banking and Product Management.