Purpose: This paper makes a novel attempt to estimate the potential impact of credit risk on foreign direct investment (FDI hereafter), thereby focusing on a completely unexplored area in the existing empirical literature. Design/methodology/approach. To provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between credit risk and FDI inflows, the study incorporates all the eight-member economies of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC hereafter) and analyzes a panel data set, over the period 2011 to 2019, extracted from the World Development Indicators, using the suitable econometric techniques for the efficient estimations of the specified models. Findings: The results indicate a negative and statistically significant relationship between the credit risk of the banking sectors and FDI inflows. Similarly, market size and inflation rate appear to be the two othe...