Kuwait Finance House
Kuwait Finance House is the standout winner of this award, beating its great domestic rival National Bank of Kuwait.
KFH reported profits of KD251 million ($821 million) in 2019, up 10.4% year on year, with net operating income up 12.5% to KD454 million and total assets rising 9.1%.
A long-time leader in Islamic finance, Kuwait Finance House continues to head the pack with a network at the end of last year of 515 branches, scattered across the GCC region, Asia, Europe and Turkey.
Plans to buy Ahli United Bank last year – a move that would have cemented its dominant position in Islamic banking – have been delayed until the end of year, due to the pandemic. Assuming it is completed, the merger would create a giant with assets of more than $100 billion, making it the world’s largest Islamic bank, and the sixth-biggest lender in the GCC region.
KFH continues to invest in clean energy and digital. In February 2020, the Central Bank of Kuwait gave the go-ahead to fund the Clean Fuel Project, a $1.65 billion plan to upgrade the Mina Abdulla and Mina Al Ahmadi refineries, and to boost output to 800,000 barrels of oil a day. Kuwait Finance House also financed a KD350 million loan to Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, and strengthened its status as the leading market-maker for secondary sukuk.
On the digital front, KFH continued to embrace new and emerging technologies. It is using robotics to mitigate forex buy/sell transaction times, boosting efficiency in the process, and during the awards period, it launched KFH Xpress, a service for instant cross-border money transfer directly from a customer’s bank account.
The Kuwaiti lender has also emerged as a domestic and a regional leader in blockchain: in August 2019, it unveiled a cross-border remittance service called ‘Instant International Transfer’, using Ripple’s blockchain technology.