Global banks scale back Gulf operations

Several global banks have begun restricting staff movement and closing branches in Gulf financial hubs after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened to target “economic centres and banks” linked to the US and Israel. According to Euronews, HSBC shut all branches in Qatar “until further notice”, Citigroup told Dubai staff to work from home and evacuated three buildings, and Goldman Sachs required employees to seek approval before entering offices across the Middle East.

The immediate trigger was Iran’s claim that a building linked to Bank Sepah in Tehran was hit, followed by an IRGC warning that residents should keep at least one kilometre away from potential targets. For banks, the point is not whether a particular threat materialises; it is that operational risk has moved from a tail scenario to a planning assumption. Once risk committees start treating a geography as persistently unstable, the response is procedural: reduce office attendance, split teams, harden access controls, and build redundancy that can survive a sudden closure of a district or a disruption to local connectivity.

Those measures look like security, but they function like a tax on doing business. Remote-first operations can keep payments running, yet they raise costs for compliance, cash logistics, physical security, and business continuity. They also change behaviour: counterparties become harder to visit, due diligence slows, and senior staff travel is curtailed. In hubs such as Dubai and Doha—built on the promise that global finance can be run from a politically stable, low-friction base—any perception of “regional war risk” hits the product itself.

The second-order effect is that private institutions begin rationing exposure before governments announce formal restrictions. A bank that instructs traders and treasury teams to stay home is signalling to clients that normal service levels may not hold. A bank that evacuates buildings is implicitly pricing the chance that a single incident could interrupt settlement, documentation, or client onboarding. Over time, this pushes marginal activity to places where insurers, auditors, and corporate boards feel more comfortable—often outside the Gulf.

Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, added to the uncertainty with a written statement aired on state television saying “studies have also been conducted on opening other fronts where the enemy has little experience and is highly vulnerable,” with activation depending on “strategic considerations,” Euronews reports. For multinational banks, that is a broad target set by design: it invites precautionary action precisely because it does not specify where the next incident would occur.

HSBC’s Qatar branches remain closed, while Citi staff in Dubai have been told to work from home and three buildings have already been evacuated.