While the insurance market has grown steadily over the past decade, market penetration in Kuwait remains limited at 0.58%, the lowest in the GCC region. Encouraged by high growth rates and favourable entry requirements, the sector has grown from six companies in 1999 to 34 today. Despite steadily increasing competition through the first half of the 2000s, the industry as a whole posted solid...
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Chapter | Islamic Financial Services from The Report: Kuwait 2013
As the government continues to develop a regulatory framework for the sector, Islamic financial instruments are playing an increasingly prominent role in banking. The country is home to one of the largest and most diverse markets for sharia-compliant instruments, and as of September 2012, a full 42.3% of Kuwait’s total banking assets were Islamic. This chapter contains an interview with Mohammad...
Chapter | Capital Markets from The Report: Kuwait 2013
With the National Development Plan providing a stable foundation for future expansion, the government is working towards revamping legislation in order to allow for some restructuring. There are also efforts under way to diversify the bourse, which will include increasingly popular and varied sharia-compliant financial instruments. As the markets continue to recover, corporate debt issuance is...
Despite a variety of ongoing challenges, Kuwait’s banking sector has performed well in recent years. The country’s 10 local banks and 11 foreign players make up one of the oldest banking sectors in the region and the third largest in the GCC. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) has introduced a raft of new regulations. Although these are likely to have a...
Articles & Analysis | Top of the heap: A look at the sector’s major players from The Report: Cote d'Ivoire 2013
While the Ivoirian banking system is characterised by a diversity of service providers, it is dominated by a few players. The top three banks control 41% of all resources, the top eight control 83.3%, while 13 of the 23 banks marshal resources of less than CFA100bn (€150m). With the exception of state-owned Banque Nationale d’Investissements (BNI)...
Articles & Analysis | Small businesses, big challenges: Increasing the lending pool for small and medium-sized enterprises from The Report: Cote d'Ivoire 2013
Smaller businesses tend to face greater difficulties in accessing credit than their larger counterparts. This is particularly the case in environments of institutional under-development or legal uncertainty. Unsurprisingly, this is a challenge affecting sub-Saharan Africa in general, including Côte d’Ivoire.