Client Name

The Bank of Punjab

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Irum Saba

SBS Thought Leadership Areas

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

SBS Thought Leadership Area Justification

The thought leadership area of Entrepreneurship and Innovation aligns closely with our ELP because the project focused on identifying a business challenge faced by The Bank of Punjab and developing innovative, practical solutions to create value. We applied entrepreneurial thinking by analyzing market gaps, benchmarking competitors, and designing new initiatives such as the Corporate Privilege Model, Payroll Express Lane, and a targeted payroll acquisition strategy. These recommendations emphasize innovation, customer-centric value creation, and strategic problem-solving, which are key principles of entrepreneurship and innovation. Our project demonstrates how innovative ideas can be used to improve organizational performance, enhance customer experience, and create sustainable competitive advantage.  

Aligned SDGs

GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

Aligned SDGs Justification

The “Decent Work and Economic Growth” (SDG 8) aligns strongly with my ELP because the project aims to improve corporate payroll banking services, enhance employee financial benefits, and support business growth through more efficient payroll solutions. By helping The Bank of Punjab attract payroll mandates, the project promotes financial inclusion, improves access to banking services for employees, and enables the bank to generate stable, low-cost funding that can be used to support economic activity and business expansion. Additionally, the proposed employee benefits, faster onboarding processes, and cross-selling opportunities contribute to better financial well-being and a more productive workforce, which are key objectives of SDG 8.  

NDA

No

Abstract

The Bank of Punjab (BOP) operates in a high interest-rate environment in which low-cost deposits

are decisive for profitability. Corporate payroll mandates - accounts through which firms disburse

employee salaries every month - are among the cheapest and stickiest sources of such deposits.

Yet in Karachi and the wider South region, BOP is consistently losing these mandates to Habib

Bank Limited (HBL), Standard Chartered (SC) and Askari Bank.

This report merges a structural gap analysis of BOP South’s payroll acquisition framework

with a competitive benchmark of its three principal rivals across the metrics that decide a payroll

mandate: branch density, onboarding speed, digital banking, and employee lifestyle benefits. It

draws on internal interviews, competitor research and a composite scorecard. The central finding

is uncomfortable: on a five-dimension scorecard BOP South scores 21 out of 50, trailing HBL

(46), Askari (38) and SC (37) - and, most tellingly, BOP’s own employees route their salaries and

discretionary spending to competitors. The report argues that BOP’s gap is largely functional and

product-oriented rather than structural, and is therefore closeable within roughly 18 months

through onboarding re-engineering, month-start app load management, a competitive lifestyle-

discount ecosystem, sharper mid-market targeting, and disciplined brand signalling.

Document Type

Restricted Access

Document Name for Citation

Experiential Learning Project

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