Eightysix-year-old Kassim Parekh, who died on Thursday, was an embodiment of conventional banking that he so adored till his last breath. Although the governorship of State Bank of Pakistan could be described as the loftiest milestone in his career, Kassim Parekh, who was widely known as "Kassim Bhai", established his life-long reputation of a highly distinguished commercial banker in the banking history of the country. That he accepted, albeit reluctantly, the post of SBP governor on strong persuasion of the then prime minister Benazir Bhutto is also a fact because he believed that Almighty God had not bestowed him with Milton Friedman's monetarist orthodoxy or the dexterity of his predecessor Imtiaz Alam Hanfi and successor Dr Mohammad Yaqub in regulating member banks in a highly efficient and meaningful manner. "Kassim Bhai" was therefore adamant to maintain his reputation of a commercial banker who provides various financial services such as accepting deposits and issuing loans in competitive and often politically charged environments. Following in the footsteps of the Rothschilds of Europe, he would exhort banks to consider a prospective client's market reputation as the most valuable collateral rather than the size of his physical assets while taking a decision on issuance of a loan.
In the formative years of his career, Kassim Bhai ostensibly operated first as an agent for Habib Bank before joining it as an employee. His deep insights into market dynamics turned him into a strong opponent of targeted lending, be it in agriculture and other fields that are largely characterized by political expediencies. Although Kassim Bhai preferred an 800cc Suzuki car to a Mercedes Benz that showed his profoundly simple approach to life, his was no humble background, nor was he born into the wretchedness of any pre-Partition ghetto for he hailed from a highly respectable family of the mercantile Memon community who were already rubbing their shoulders with the social elites and exerting, if veiled, influence on market outcomes. That his conduct was guided by deep ethics is also a too well known fact that helped him become a "repository of trust" for his clients and the businessmen of the country, enabling him to play a highly important role of an intermediary between lending institutions and the market players. In "Kassim Bhai's" death, no doubt, the country has lost a strong proponent of conventional banking that owes its growth more to the profundity of personal lender-loanee relationship than the criticality of statutory rules and regulations.