KUWAIT: Global Finance, the internationally renowned publication, has crowned Boubyan Bank’s successes with six prestigious awards of its annual awards that recognize the most outstanding and innovative financial and banking institutions in offering consumer and digital banking services for the year 2024. This took place during a special ceremony in the presence of a group of elite bankers, economists, and leaders from various economic sectors.
Boubyan Bank was uniquely recognized with the award for the "World’s Best Islamic Digital Bank” for the tenth year in a row, thereby reinforcing its digital leadership over a full decade atop all Islamic institutions in the banking sector, coupled with receiving a similar award in the same domain across the Middle East and Kuwait, in addition to the award for the "Best Corporate/Institutional Digital Bank in Kuwait”.
Additionally, the bank’s Business Banking Department serving SMEs, received two awards for the "Best SME Banking/SME Platform in Kuwait” and the "World’s Best SME Payments Innovation”.
During a ceremony held in London, Abdullah Al-Mejhem – Chief Private Banking and Consumer Banking, and Zaid Al-Sadoun, Assistant General Manager - Business Banking, received the awards on behalf of the bank.
On this occasion, Al-Mejhem stated: "We are very delighted with this special recognition, which crowns our ceaseless efforts towards achieving the best unexpected results and our commitment to employing cutting-edge technology. This happens while keeping up with, and accelerating, banking innovations to reinforce the success of Boubyan’s program for inclusiveness, which aligns well with the bank’s status as a leader in innovation and in adopting many emerging technologies. Our goal from all that is to shift conventional work environments to a fully digitalized one to lead the financial sector in Kuwait and the region.”
The best Islamic digital bank, globally, regionally and domestically
"Our digital excellence continued year after year culminating in our leadership for 10 consecutive years in Islamic digital banking globally to rank among top and leading regional and international banking institutions. This is but the fruit of long years of hard work, successful strategies, and outlook with a vision about the changes in the Islamic digital banking scene, thus largely contributing to the successful investment in - and making the roadmap for - digital growth”, he added.
He went on to elaborate: "Through Boubyan’s strategy, we focused on setting digital innovation methodologies that contributed to the execution of the digital transformation strategy and sustainable enterprise excellence. We made a comprehensive and integrated ecosystem of digital solutions and services, which made a leap and full transformation in the concept of digitalization by upgrading the infrastructure and reinforcing our operational performance in order to provide unique and cutting-edge offerings through Boubyan’s platform for digital services, its ITMs, and branches’ network, thus reinforcing our excellence in providing a smooth digital banking experience that caters for the financial needs of all segments of customers.”
Al-Mejhem pointed out: "Despite the fierce competition among top financial institutions, we managed to innovate a group of digital services and solutions on a par with global ones in terms of efficiency and outstanding performance. This focused on shaping a more advanced future so that Boubyan’s platform for retail, corporate, and SMEs’ digital services and solutions may offer a diverse group of unique digital solutions and state-of-the-art digital payment solutions to keep up with our customers’ expectations and to meet the needs of their growing business in a manner that ensures swifter and smoother execution of transactions.”
He added: "These digital awards confirm our success in exceeding all expectations, as we now stand with a new unprecedented digital achievement that puts many responsibilities and challenges ahead of us to maintain such a trust, and drives us to exert more efforts to make greater achievements across all levels.”
Best SME banking/SME platform in Kuwait
On his part, Al-Sadoun stated: "Boubyan has demonstrated excellence and keenness on providing its business banking customers with the best digital banking solutions. Ever since the formation of the Business Banking Department at Boubyan, we have managed to prove our leadership in providing the necessary financial and advisory support to entrepreneurs to enable them to translate their ideas into reality. The bank further incentivizes their growth opportunities, considering them a key pillar to diversify the revenues of the national economy.”
"The awards received by Boubyan Bank for its Business Banking Department, which serves SMEs, emphasize the bank’s ceaseless efforts to enrich the experience of its entrepreneurial customers, and to give them more uniqueness, which adds value through more innovative and cutting-edge banking solutions and services to enable them to improve performance and increase productivity.”, he added.
In its report about the selection criteria for crowning Boubyan with both awards, Global Finance states that the bank managed over the past years to provide unique banking solutions to entrepreneurs in line with the latest developments, especially the digital ones, in order to incentivize the business environment, thus contributing to the growth special of their business across various sectors.
Al-Mejhem concluded: "We do understand that the future is yet to bring about more developments accompanied with challenges; however, we are ready to deal with any new developments related to the accelerating digital transformation in light of our track record and our creativity and innovative abilities to keep up with a comprehensive transformation of service digitalization to make services smoother, more convenient, and time-saving.”
Why is Boubyan the best digitally across all levels?
Global Finance recognized Boubyan Bank with the digital banking awards based on the following criteria:
• Success of its strategy focused on investment and expansion of its digital services
• Enhancing its role in digital financial inclusion through the innovative digital solutions it offers
• Success in getting clients to use digital offerings
• Growth of customers who use digital banking services through their various channels, whether through online banking or smart phones