Sharifah Faigah Syed Alwi

Impact of Mindful Consumption (MC) on Investment Decision: A Study Within Malaysian Individual Investors

Mindful consumption is considered to be a new wave of consumer behaviour. Moreover, as an increasingly educated and financially sophisticated society, Malaysia has the potential to further the trend of mindful consumption in everyday living while, at the same time, contributing towards sustainable future. This paper was designed to extend the line of discussion between the trends of mindful consumption in Malaysian society according to the mindful consumption model by Sheth et al. (J Acad Mark Sci 39:21–39, 2011). This model was adopted in this study as the guiding principle where mindful consumption is premised on a consumer mindset of caring for self, caring for community and lastly caring for nature that reflect behaviourally into temperance with acquisitive, repetitive and aspirational consumption. Correspondingly, this paper focuses on mindful consumption of investors towards investment decision making. In addition, this allows them to tell their own perspective on how mindful consumption impacted their investment decision-making. It is anticipated that by adopting mindful consumption in this study, the reasons towards investor’s investment decision can be identified through their consumption behaviour.

An Issue on Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits (UCP) No 600 for Islamic Letter of Credit

Islamic banks in Malaysia offer Letter of Credit (LC) Wakalah (agency) and LC Murabahah (cost-plus) as two of their main trade finance facilities. LC is the product of International Chamber of Commerce, the world business organization based in Paris and it is governed by the Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits (UCP) No. 600 (UCP 600). The objective of this paper is to clarify an issue on a few articles of the UCP 600 as the governing rules of LC Wakalah and LC Murabahah. At the same time, this paper discusses the practice of some Islamic banks in Malaysia in facing this issue. This study adopts the qualitative method as the main research methodology where both the primary and the secondary data are used. For the primary data, semi-structured interviews were conducted with bankers who are directly involved with the operation of Islamic LCs. As the result, this paper discovers an issue on the UCP 600 for Islamic LCs that is the issue of insufficiency in dealing solely with documents for LC Wakalah and LC Murabahah without checking the conditions of goods. This paper analyzes this issue by determining whether it is in line with the Shariah principles. Lastly, a solution to resolve the issue on the UCP 600 for Islamic LCs is recommended to Bank Negara Malaysia.