The potential of Islamic microfinance does not only restrict to the need of
meeting demands, but also to integrate the Islamic social principle to care for
the less fortunate with microfinance’s ability in providing financial access to the
poor. As the religious values contradict to the operations of conventional MFIs,
large numbers of Muslim communities have been quite reluctant to participate
in microfinance programmes. In this respect, Islamic MFIs may be a suitable
alternative in countries where Muslims are predominant. Islamic microfinance
is said to be lagging behind the other conventional microfinance since there is
a huge untapped Islamic microfinance where there is only 10.9% penetration
into the market. The main objective of this study is to examine the factors that
affect Malaysian customers’ perspective in participating in using Islamic
microfinance. This study adopts a research framework of Decomposed Theory
of Planned Behaviour. This paper used primary data collected by selfadministered
questionnaires involving a sample of 166 respondents from
Islamic microfinance users. This study revealed that among eleven beliefs,
only two of them are not significant which are awareness of clients and their
attitude towards using Islamic microfinance and the normative beliefs of
others affected clients’ subjective norms to participate in Islamic
microfinance. The data were collected from existing clients of Islamic
microfinance. Thus, behavioural intention is excluded from the study. The
sample size of the study and also the scope of the study is limited since it only
focus in peninsular Malaysia. For future research study, it may be broaden to
includes behavioural intention as the variables and also to broaden the scope
of the study. The finding of this study may help Islamic microfinance providers
to better manage by focussing on relative advantage and behavioural control
to build client relationships.
