A common theme throughout the GCC’s insurance markets is the gradual shift towards compulsory private health care. The issue has been on the agenda of regulators for years, and the sustained period of low oil prices which began in late 2014 has strengthened the desire of governments to shift some of the burden of health care provision to the...
The Kuwait insurance industry entered 2017 after a challenging period which saw premium growth maintained but profitability declining year-on-year. High levels of competition and low oil prices make a reversal of this trend in the short term a daunting prospect. However, a number of developments in the pipeline – including a new legislative...
In late 2016 the Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) made a significant change to the Islamic financial services (IFS) sector. Like most regulators in the region, the CBK has traditionally taken a universal stance on its conventional and sharia-compliant financial institutions, regulating both segments simultaneously and only making exceptions where...
What can Islamic financial institutions do to demonstrate their resilience, even in a period of global financial crisis?
Kuwait’s Islamic financial services (IFS) industry is one of the fastest-growing segments of the financial sector, home to an increasing number of sharia-compliant banks and insurance companies. The emergence of these industries over recent decades has brought sharia-compliant capital to account for a significant proportion of total capital...
After a year characterised by low trading volumes and a horizontal main index, the Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE) opened 2017 as the fastest-growing market in the world. A number of reasons combine to make the KSE a destination of interest for investors in 2017, chief among them being new management, which has begun to implement an ambitious...
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