Emerging Challenges in Banking in Asia and the Pacific

This open access book examines how banking systems in Asia and the Pacific can remain resilient in the face of future shocks, drawing lessons from past crises and current policy challenges. As climate change, technological disruption, increasing global interconnectedness reshape the banking landscape and pose implications to financial stability, the volume explores key issues including digital transformation, cybersecurity, financial inclusion, crisis preparedness, monetary and prudential policy, central bank digital currencies, and climate-related financial risks. Using evidence from countries across the region, it shows how innovation, regulation, and sustainability are reshaping banking. The volume offers practical policy recommendations for building stable, inclusive, and future-ready financial systems.

Rachita Gulati is a Research Economist at the Asian Development Bank Institute, Tokyo, Japan. She is also an Associate Professor (Economics) at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, Uttarakhand. She received the Subir Chowdhury Visiting Fellowship 2017-2018 from the India Observatory, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, London, United Kingdom. With over 16 years of academic and research experience, she specializes in banking and financial institutions, regulation, stability, governance, digitalization, applied econometrics, and efficiency and productivity analysis. Her work involves the development of nonparametric models for performance benchmarking across sectors. She has led and coordinated several policy-oriented research projects in collaboration with central banks, ministries, and prominent think tanks across South, Southeast, and East Asia. She has contributed to studies funded by the Reserve Bank of India, the Haryana State Finance Commission, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), among others. She is actively involved in several national and international academic associations and published in peer-reviewed journals.

Dil Rahut is Vice-Chair of Research and Senior Economist at Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI). His research focuses on development microeconomics, agricultural economics, and environmental and natural resource economics. He is currently implementing experiments and field research in agriculture, natural resources, and climate in Asia. Prior to joining ADBI, he was a senior global program manager for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre’s (CIMMYT) socioeconomics and sustainable intensification programs and served as chair of the staffs’ committee at CIMMYT. He also previously worked for the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan’s Research and Statistics Department and served as a research fellow at the WorldFish Centre; senior fellow and Japan chair at the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations; chief of research, planning, and monitoring and Visa/Mastercard director at the Bank of Bhutan Ltd; and assistant professor of development economics at South Asian University. He has over 200 publications in Scopus indexed journals and has guest-edited several special journal issues. He also serves as an editorial board member of the Asian Development Review and lectures. He lectures at the University of Tokyo and Hitotsubashi University in Japan on recent issues in development economics.

Sunil Kumar holds a position of Professor in Economics at the Faculty of Economics at South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi, India. With over 29 years of teaching experience, he has a strong background in subjects related to quantitative methods, banking and financial institutions, and applied econometrics. His research interests revolve around efficiency measurement in banking and financial institutions using data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis approaches. He has published numerous scholarly articles in prestigious national and international journals. He has authored two books exploring efficiency and productivity in the manufacturing and banking sectors of the Indian economy. The Indian Society of Regional Science, the Indian Economic Association, and The Econometric Society are among his professional affiliations. He recently completed a research project with the Reserve Bank of India on “Governance, Efficiency and Soundness of Indian Banks”.

Tetsushi Sonobe is a senior professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), where he has taught development economics and international cooperation for 22 years mostly to government officials from Asia and Africa. As a researcher, he has studied the process of industrial development and the management of businesses and government offices in developing countries. His interest in management led him to serve as GRIPS vice president from 2014 to 2020 and ADBI Dean and CEO from 2020 to 2025. Currently, he studies industrial policy for sustainable development and serves as the president of the Japanese Association for Development Economics (JADE).