National Bank of Kuwait Wants to Promote Mobile Banking

The National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) is letting customers update their mobile numbers through its banking app or website using their new Virgin Mobile numbers.

According to a Wednesday (Aug. 17) news release from the bank, the move is designed to offer customers a better banking experience and simplify their transactions. The NBK recently added Virgin Mobile, a popular provider among its customers, to its list of telecom operators.

The bank wants customers to update their data and provide it with new emails and phone numbers so that NBK can send customers SMS, push notifications and promotional messages about its latest campaigns and offers.

Related: PYMNTS GCC Series: Partnerships, PayTech Innovation Move Kuwait Into Digital Era

“At NBK, we strive to enrich our customers’ banking experience, by providing all means of comfort and enabling them to make their transactions quickly and easily, anytime and anywhere, leveraging our digital channels and leadership as a provider of digital banking services,” said Hala Al Shoaibi, who heads NBK’s digital service quality management operations.

Shoaibi added that the bank is seeing increased dependence among customers on digital channels for their transactions, partially in response to the NBK’s services, and partly due to “the exceptional circumstances resulting from the pandemic.”

PYMNTS looked at the state of FinTechs in Kuwait in June as part of a larger series on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

The nation is home to the world’s oldest sovereign wealth fund, the Kuwait Investment Authority, and has a finance sector that is relatively more mature than those in other GCC countries like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in terms of traditional financial services.

But when digital-first bank Weyay debuted in the country last year, Kuwait trailed some of its more FinTech-friendly neighbors.

However, digital-forward banks such as Kuwait Finance House (KFH) and NBK, which owns Weyay, have begun to modernize and embraced blockchain technology through an instant cross-border collaboration with Ripple. In addition, the Gulf Bank has also deployed biometric facial recognition in its mobile banking application to authenticate instead of using passwords.

For all PYMNTS EMEA coverage, subscribe to the daily EMEA Newsletter.