Considering its support to the banking awareness campaign “Be Aware”, Kuwait Finance House (KFH) continues to enhance financial culture for all customer categories and shed light on secured saving and investment through all its channels on social media and website.

KFH is keen on preparing well studied and meaningful materials and contents to enhance financial culture and spread awareness among customers on the difference between Saving (saving part of the funds to use it later) and Investment (allocation of a certain amount of money and place it in a certain product or service to realize profit)

These awareness efforts come as part of the “Be Aware” campaign which it had launched beginning of 2021 in collaboration with Kuwait Banking Association to spread banking awareness and enhance its social program and objectives. The social program aims to alleviate the level of the public awareness of the banking services and products and how to take protection measures against fraud, theft, and high-risk investments.

Kuwaiti banks provide various secured investment products and services to enable the customer to manage his investments and increase his returns. These products include various investment deposits i.e., an amount of money deposited by the customer in his bank account and invested by the bank to realize returns for the customer periodically. The customer may retrieve the deposit amount after the lapse of the contract period.

Investment funds are also part of the services offered by banks. They represent a combined investment tool that enables the bank to invest participants funds to realize profits. The fund is managed by a specialized manager in this field against certain fees. Investments in this fund are diversified as they include stocks, bonds, merchandise, money markets and others. Its worth mentioning that the investment funds of banks are under the control and authorization of Capital Markets Authority.

The investment saving account is an account where the customer deposits the amounts he wishes to save, and the bank invests these funds and deposits the returns in the same account on periodical basis. The difference between this account and the deposit account is that it is possible to withdraw from this account and deposit funds therein at any time.

KFH reiterated the significance of the customer’s investment plans as they are the means to be prepared for future needs e.g., children education, starting a personal project, retirement…etc. These plans help in saving funds in a bank account on regular basis and invest such funds to realize profit. These returns are gathered with the amounts deposited by the customer during the plan period so that they would be ready at the end of the period.

Investments differ according to their risk level. High risk investments are those which are not governed or organized by any regulatory authorities or the laws that provide protection to the investor. Virtual currencies are considered as one of the high-risk investments as they don’t fall under the control of the Central Bank of Kuwait or any authority local or globally. Virtual currencies are considered as an asset used for trading against services or commodities. They are not centralized or controllable and transactions made can’t be monitored or tracked.

Many people do speculation (Mudarabah) transactions with these virtual currencies by running buy/sell transactions, thus hoping to realize profit when the virtual currency value increases against main currencies e.g., US$. Speculations on virtual currencies have increased also because of the spread of offers promising huge profits on this kind of investments. However, the part which these offers did not cover is the massive fluctuation in the value of these virtual currencies as they move up and down sharply in an unpredictable manner. Some investors made fortunes while many others lost their wealth and savings.

It is worth mentioning that KFH focuses always on organizing several training courses for its employees to raise their experience level in their fields of specialty and encourage them to transfer this information in a simple and focused manner to customers through direct contact at service locations or through social media and e-channels of the bank.