If we consider trends in Islamic Investment banking, establishment of more Islamic banks should work towards improving services and lowering charges of these institutions. Therefore, the establishment of new Islamic Banks in the country could be considered a positive step in the direction of eliminating the monopoly that exists in this market. On the other hand in terms of marketing and educating the retail consumers, Islamic banks need to be more proactive to be able to attract new clients. Kuwait Finance House will no doubt lose retail consumers with the active entry of new banks such as Boubyan and Kuwait Real Estate Bank. Also, if the banking market reports are to be believed and foreign banks are allowed to enter the market with Islamic banking services, continuing the current growth of KFH will be difficult in terms of retail banking. KFH has been enjoying considerable growth over the past few years and it needs to change the various aspects of its operations to continue its leadership position in the long run. It currently enjoys a market leader position and therefore is at a competitive advantage over other banks. The research also highlights that with the increase in competition within the banking industry, Islamic banks should not only depend upon Muslims as a source of depositor. They should try to increase their customer base by including non-Muslims as potential customers (Haron et al 1994b) and in Kuwait their focus should particularly be towards the expatriate community which is largely ignored. Our findings leads us to conclude that a more user/ customer friendly environment needs to be created by Islamic banks by reaching out to expatriate retail consumers in the Kuwait market and use English as a medium for communication, advertising and other public relation activities. This research along with the work done previously by researchers shows that the various bank selection criteria would be different for different countries. The current research also highlights better return on investment, quality of services offered by the bank, easily available ATM facilities and bank reputation as being most important for the majority of the consumers. Compared to previous works the one factor which is seen common to all consumers throughout various countries is the quality of service and efficiency of service offered by the bank. Based on the inferential results, the research also implies that some of the factors based on which the opinions of people differed was interest rates, special services for women, effective advertising, online brokerage facilities, and credit services. Choice of the first two attributes may differ due to religious and cultural differences.
But differences in ratings for latter attributes by different bank consumers is probably because of lower importance attached to these services in Islamic financial institutions while these remain to be important for banking consumer community.
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