Islamic bank expands in a western way

Close your eyes, and Majid al-Refai sounds like a typical businessman from the Deep South. The US-born banker has a habit of punctuating his sentences with “You get it?” and phrases such as “Isn’t that the damndest thing?”

But his appearance tells another story. Dressed in a white thobe and sandals and sporting a luxuriant chest-length beard, Mr Refai is every inch the Islamic banker.

“I’m a Muslim brought up in a Christian world, and my aim is to put that western thinking to good use in this market,” says the founder and chief executive of Unicorn Investment Bank, an Islamic finance house based in Bahrain. “Everyone in the Gulf is focused on trading and real estate. Our task is institution-building.”