What’s In It for Me? Profiling Opportunity Seeking Customers in Malaysian Islamic Banking Sector

This paper aims at analyzing the preferences of Malaysian bank customers with a focus on identifying characteristics of the opportunity seekers, those who only consider the economic benefit of the product offered. We also look at the determinants of consumers preferences for financial products used for resource mobilization, and for financing of business start-ups. Starting from an innovative methodology of identifying opportunity seekers as clients with inconsistency in their preferences, we apply asymptotic statistical methods for estimation, comparison of binomial proportions and with multinomial discrete choice on a survey of 1858 retail consumers. We find that although Muslims are more likely to choose Islamic banks, they are also the most likely customers to be economic value seekers. In addition, our findings support that the growth of Islamic banks in Malaysia is conditional on their ability to attract high-income earners.