02Author profile

Michael Shang

Asian Business Lead · Kiwibank

Auckland, New Zealand

I learned the mechanics of trust in Beijing, in Bank of China's head-office trade services team. Documentary credit is a machine for letting strangers do business: nobody relies on anyone's word, and everything relies on whether the documents match the story. It was a strange place to start, and it turned out to be the right one—much of what I now believe about credit began as a question about why a bill of lading did not match an invoice.

Corporate banking on the New Zealand side of the corridor taught the opposite lesson: most cross-border deals do not fail on substance. They fail in translation—between information organised for running a business and information organised for underwriting one, between relationship-led expectations and disclosure-led process. I have spent much of my career as the person in the middle of that translation.

The mid-market years since, at BNZ and now Kiwibank, added a third conviction: what growing businesses lack is rarely ambition, and rarely capital. It is structure—the precise request, the covenant calendar that fits the actual cash cycle, the evidence assembled before it is asked for. That is the gap this site is written into. It is not a digital résumé; it is the frameworks and notes, kept because they stay true.

The way I work follows from the same convictions. Responsiveness is table stakes; what clients actually remember is judgment when information is incomplete, preparation that respects their time, and plain speech about trade-offs before commitments harden into something difficult to unwind. Tools and templates keep changing. Context, trade-off clarity, and ownership of recommendations—especially when the answer is uncomfortable—are the parts of this craft I expect to stay human.

The division of labour across what I write is deliberate: this site carries the structures, The Corridor Desk—a monthly LinkedIn newsletter—carries the timely reads, the Banking Judgment Lab carries the practice, and the long argument is a book: How Bankers Think, published by Highbank Press. Nothing here is dated, and nothing here will ask you to check back.

The views on this site are my own and do not represent those of my employer or any institution I work with.